Look at a few sports bikes in the café car park nowadays and you'll see a steering damper bolted on somewhere. Old Brit race bikes started it all with a crude friction damper fitted on the headstock. Turn the big black Bakelite knob and you compressed two friction plates which seized the steering just about solid enough to allow the bikes to charge about on bumpy old unmade tracks on the Isle of Man with some modicum of control. Fully adjustable, even on the move - until they seized solid, materials being pretty crude in those days as they hadn't invented titanium or anodising.

Wind the clock forward 300 years and Suzuki had marginally improved the breed with their cast iron, steam-oil damped model fitted to the original GSXRs .... oh, and still fitted to the latest hot-poop GSXR1000, which is odd. However, the bolt-on boys soon twigged that increasingly affluent bikers would shell out loads of money on something a bit more stylish, so they set about making nice alloy dampers with anodised bodies and shiny slidey bits. Deciding that an old knob stuck on top of the steering head was a bit passé, they opted for a side mounting, running the damper from the frame to the fork leg. The damper now relied on oil to work its magic, controlling the movement of a fixed rod inside the sliding casing. Adjustment was made by changing the size of the oilway aperture by a remote rod - the smaller the opening, the less oil can pass, the slower the rod can move so the greater the damping effect.

The M.Toby damper - most follow the same basic design

Everyone was pretty happy with this set-up until Ducati turned the steering damper into an essential fashion accessory by sticking it back on top of the bike, just behind the top yoke and running across the bike rather than in line. It meant a more inventive linkage, but boy did it look trick. Now everyone and his brother wanted one of these stuck on his FS1E.

Pretty soon manufacturers had come up with fitting kits so that we could all disport dampers stuck up in the air in front of our petrol tanks. By a gash bit of bracketry trapped under the headstock nut and various bent bits of metal bolted to the frame the damper was made to work, even though we then had to remove the thing plus bits of bracket to get the tank off for basic servicing of the engine. The advantage with the top mounting is reduced angular motion and slider travel, plus the damping affect is more centrally ... er, centred.

HyperPro fitting for the 2000 R1 - not too sure about this one ...

The rather more conservative Sprint fitting

We now have a whole range of designs and fitting kits from various manufacturers - Öhlins, HyperPro, Sprint, Maxton, Toby ... even a rather posh looking one from an Italian firm who CNC it out of titanium and market it as Matris or ExtremeTech, for instance. All jolly good stuff.

Prices range from around £180/£200 for a Maxton or Sprint billy-basic side mounter (called a "race" fitting) to £250 plus for a top-mounting unit. Or how about a nice shiny M.Toby titanium item - £400 plus postage to you, squire.

Hyperpro have come up with a jolly wheeze that sounds rather good - the Active Control Damper. Their press blurb states: "Active control means that as the steering force increases, so does the damping effect. This results in a smooth easy-handling ride at low speeds combined with heavy dampening during extreme situations. The best of both worlds - truly a breakthrough in dampening design." And who are we to argue?

Scotts rise above all this modernist hoo-ha and offer you this delightful design - smacks of the old BSA friction damper .. Never actually seen one in real life, mind. Why not start a trend and fit one to your bike? It's got multi adjustable everything which can be dialled in as conditions require with a twiddle of the various knobs and levers. High speed and low speed damping plus an adjustable "arc of damping" - not to be confused with the much more damp ark of Noah. It does cost over £400, but being a leader of fashion was never cheap.

Now the uncomfy question must be asked. Why do we fit these bloody things to our bikes? They are usually either backed right off so they have no meaningful effect at all, or they are done up so tight it feels like the front tyre is flat.

Well, modern litre sports bikes can get plenty hairy when given serious stick - light weight, short wheelbase, loadsa grunt and quick steering all mean instant lift of the front end when you whack the throttle open. Throw in a few humps and bumps and the bars soon start to flap about a bit. Nothing much wrong with this until speeds get a bit high, and cresting Pflanzgarten 2 with a bit of lean on and lots of slapping is not conducive to extended lappage. Adjustment of the damping level is important and luckily most dampers have an easy-twiddle knob somewhere handy so you can change the effect as you ride.

Mounting-wise I prefer the fitting between the headlights and the headstock, like the old GSXR11s. Nice and neat and not at all showy. But you Box Hill chaps will doubtless plump for the top-mounter.

Bought a copy of Superbike the other day for a read and gawp at the centre pages of course.

There was a feature on the 2005 Fireblade against the past masters like Gixer K4, K2 etc. to see how it faired. Needless to say the Blade was voted the best overall, but not fastest (K4 got that), but there was a very interesting couple of paragraphs that I highlighted and thought I must share with you ....I quote:

"The Blade doesn't turn in with the voracity of it's rivals, but in many ways, that's no bad thing as the Honda offers stability and growing confidence as if it's going out of style. The addition of the almost too-clever-by-half electronic steering damper is an admission by Honda's Engineers that without one life could be a little too interesting, but it offers security in abundance when conditions dictate.
That said, the extra muscle and guise needed to get the blade through a set of tight bends or through a flick-flack of a clear roundabout is noticeable; especially on track or passing through Milton Keynes. But extra mass is extra mass, and for all the feedback the Fireblade offers, you can't escape the fact that the Honda is harder to hustle than it's rivals. Push it hard, and the Fireblade responds, even though you think it won't. The rewards are sweet, but can remain distant unless you really push yourself"

Or as I would say, "unbolt the damn damper and have a much better ride without having a work out whilst chasing your mates down B roads that are far more bumpy that Milton Keynes roundabouts!!"

Anyway, at least Superbike got it sort of right, but then went the wrong way, why would you want to knacker yourself out with a hard to turn in motorcycle, sod that, my Blade turns sweeter than any bike I've ever ridden now, but obviously these pussies wouldn't know where to start. Make up your own minds, but this damper is the Blade's Achilles heel in my book!!

If you want to get a proper damper e-mail Sarah at extreme.bykesportz@btinternet.com and she'll sell you a nice HyperPro kit ...

Having said all that, we're still trying to work out if the Blade's leccy damper is better at speed. Certainly it's better at very low speeds, but how much does that matter? Is it slowing things down when the pace is upped?