The Lowdown Show - By ADVrider

This week on the Lowdown Radio Show Motorcycle Global’s Michael Uhlarik joins us to talk about the global motorcycle trade. Much of which is far more unexpected than you might think. For instance, Michael hunted down the most searched motorcycles online in India, Italy, and the US. Two of those countries most often searched for aspirational bikes while one country chose a sensible, economical, mid...

Do you know where your parts come from? It’s a serious question. One posed recently in a most unusual public confession by Nikola Maletic from Perun Moto, a manufacturer of high-end bits for your ADV motorcycle. Tired of having his parts copied by another manufacturer—even to the degree that they reused his catalogue photos and descriptions—he didn’t get mad, go online, and lose his mind. How old-...

This week our guest is John Bentham, who just this year published Bike Week, a collection of photographs taken over more than a decade at Daytona’s notorious spring gathering. Bentham first went to Daytona in the mid-‘90s and would return another dozen times when his career as a New York City editorial and advertising photographer allowed. It just so happened that John’s attendance at Daytona bega...

This week, Lowdown Show host Neil Graham and ADVrider editor Zac Kurylyk wrap up 2025 with a conversation that ranges across all segments of motorcycling. From Zac's recovery following his bad crash last fall, to Neil's successful return to the racetrack, to the future of Harley-Davidson and KTM, the difference between Dakar and the Africa Eco Race in the upcoming rally raid season—they take a loo...

Aaron Pufal is far more than just a man with a grey beard. He’s the grey-bearded mastermind behind the ADV Cannonball coast-to-coast GPS rally. It’s not like the old cannonball runs, those ones in which you’d rip through Ohio at 130 miles per hour at 3 am after having ingested a fistful of little white pills. No, this a rally you can do on your oversized adventure bike while following the law of t...

Ex-Confederate motorcycle designer JT Nesbitt—whose current project is re-imagining the American motorcycle with his audacious Magnolia 4—stepped into the fray recently and wrote an open letter to New York Times bestselling author Scott Galloway. Galloway’s book, titled “On being a man,” discusses the so-called “masculinity crisis” affecting young males—the very same young males that not so many g...

Michael Uhlarik from Motorcycle Global joins Neil Graham to talk about—wait for it—motorcycle seats and mirrors from a designer’s perspective. And then Neil makes the case for an ADV motorcycle inspired by Kawasaki’s 400 cc four-cylinder ZX-4R screamer—a high-spec, small displacement bike with all the tech of a big bike but without the bulk of something like a 1290 Adventure. Like a 600 cc V-twin...

The late great Steve Thornton edited ADVRider.com's Photo Of The Week feature for years. I’m happy to report we’ve found a worthy successor to carry on Steve’s work. And I don’t say that casually. Katie Hunter is just about as singular a personality as was Steve. She rides an BMW airhead, she’d rather shiver at a campsite than have a warm shower, and she’s worked at a funeral home as an embalmer....

Mirrors on motorcycles are almost universally wretched. They either present you with a movie of your elbows or they whimper and fold at merely the thought of a twig brushing against them. Most of us just complain about them. A wonderful motorcycle with bad mirrors is dead to us. (Unless it’s Italian.) But one man with a similarly vexed history with the mirror put his foot down, drew a line in the...

Dallas Shannon from Traction ERag Adventures joins Neil to outline their upcoming schools and to debunk some of the myths that surround off-road riding. We’re in a peculiar moment in that the ADV-style motorcycle is the de-facto standard of our age, and yet taking a significantly-sized motorcycle into the dirt is beyond the skillset of many a purchaser. Dallas & company hope to change that. Have a...

It’s the most important motorcycle show in the world and regular contributor and Motorcycle Global main-man Michael Uhlarik is here to give The Lowdown the lowdown. We’ll address the rise of the Chinese, the resurgence of Honda, the absence of KTM and ponder a scooter with two cupholders. And lots more, including ADV bikes-a-plenty. Because of the liberal use of video and photographs, you may wish...

Scott Calhoun has the most bizarre motorcycling history of any man I’ve met. Up until age 55 he hadn’t ridden a motorcycle. And then, for the next decade, he rode every paved road in America that held any promise for enthusiasts. Every single road. Then the co-founder of Butler Motorcycle Maps—that’s why he rode those roads—sold his BMW and moved on to disc golf. What you and I would call tossing...

Have you ever been away, for vacation or for work, and had to rent a car? But what if you could rent a motorcycle instead of a car? Of course you can rent motorcycles now. But it’s often a cumbersome process involving a dealership—which can complicate pickup and drop-off if they’re far from you and that often limits you to whatever units they dedicate as rentals. But what if you could rent a wide...

If you’ve ever watched police riders whip a Harley or a big BMW in and around pylons that appear impossibly close together, then you’ll appreciate this week’s guest, Quinn Redeker. Redeker is a maverick in the world of pilon-slaloming in that he adopts techniques from most all motorcycling disciplines, including, but not limited to, motocross, trials and roadracing. Even if you’re not interested i...

Gregory Frazier skips to his own beat. Dr. G, as he prefers to be called, is an author and globe-trotting bon-vivant and a man often mistaken for Ozzy Osbourne—when Ozzy was still living, presumably. Dr. G riffs to Neil Graham about pioneer motorcycle traveller Carl Stearns Clancy, references a book he considers the best ever written about an RTW trip, and disses on meeting Robert Pirsig—yes, the...

When Lang Hindle’s career as a superbike racer ended he turned to the art of pipe bending, using experience gained in racing to build an empire of exhaust. Lang and Neil discuss the art of tuning, the mindset of a racer, the progression of an industry, and—naturally—noise.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daryl Tearne—fresh out of design school—landed the oddest dream gig of all: redesigning the Crocker motorcycle for the modern age. Crocker, with less than 50 ever made, make brands like Vincent seem mainstream. But Tearne did the near impossible and made a prototype that was at once futuristic and traditional. When that project hit a wall, he moved on to Buell, for yet another project that hit an...

For more than a decade, small, independent manufacturers have tantalized us with promises of mass electric motorcycle production. We are constantly told of new technologies that will revolutionize the battery bike scene, and yet this corner of the motorcycle world has been filled with bankruptcies, not success stories. Now Honda is about to launch their first full-sized electric motorcycle, early...

Is Stoicism the secret to speed? From timid to 200 miles per hour—how Louisa Swaden used stoicism’s principles to unleash the woman within. And how her new book—The Stoic Rider—can help you to do the same. This week on the Lowdown podcast Louisa talks to Neil Graham about how motorcycles changed her life, long before she had any idea on how to change a tire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

Most every type of motorcycle originated in Europe. Paris—of all places—begat the supermoto and our beloved ADV. But that’s not all. Michael Uhlarik reports in from Italy on a motorcycling culture more inclusive and less dismissive than our ways in the west. We also talk Roman roads, Roman chariots, and expertly ridden motorcycles owned by people who don’t really consider themselves enthusiasts. D...

Summer's almost over, so what did we get out of it? Rumors and confirmations of new motorcycles, a lot of wildfires and some surprising stories about the situation that average riders face at their local dealerships. The Lowdown Show wraps up August with a talk with ADVrider's managing editor Zac Kurylyk. Zac and host Neil Graham discuss the topics that have made headlines this summer, like issues...

Longtime Cycle World and Road & Track writer Peter Egan is back with a new book. Landings in America chronicles a mid-‘80s trip around the US with his wife Barb in a vintage Piper Cub airplane. Landings is a classic Egan travelogue with a dash of reflective pathos that lends the book the gravitas of memoir. Neil Graham talks to Peter about the trip, about motorcycles, and about why it took him 35...

Harley-Davidson at the crossroads. How bad are things at H-D? They’ve sold off a chunk of the ultra-profitable financial services division in an attempt to keep the wolves from the door. Will the new CEO—plucked from the world of pizza and golf—be able to craft a plan to lead the brand back onto its feet? Michael is doubtful. And hopeful. But time, just as it is for all men, is running out. Learn...

The proposed selling of public lands and looming tariffs threaten to derail an already struggling US motorcycle market. Motorcycle Industry Council lobbyist Scott Schloegel, who for years worked inside government, has, for the past eight years, worked to bring the interests of US motorcycle manufacturers and distributors to legislators and lawmakers. In addition to a 2025 status report, Schloegel...

The motorcycle manufacturers' head offices tell us not to worry about the state of dealerships in North America—"Everything's fine, fine fine!" we're told. But if you look around, you see dealerships closing everywhere, and others seeming to be in financial straits. What's going on? Dealers are close-lipped trying to avoid trouble with the OEMs' bigwigs. But Mark Sheffield, who's been working on w...