Sportsbikes, café racers, roadsters: keeping a trace of every ride

You know the feeling: a three-hundred-kilometre ride, two perfect sequences of corners, a ridge road stumbled upon between two villages. Three weeks later you want to take a friend back there. And you have no idea. Not the name of the village, not the way in.

That is the real subject here: on a bike ridden for pleasure, the ride is the product. And nothing keeps it.

01What memory does not hold

A regular rider does a few dozen good rides a year. What survives six months later is three photos at the top of a pass and a general impression. What has vanished:

• The exact sequence — which back road, taken in which direction.
• The detour you found to avoid the main road.
• The actual duration of the loop, the one that lets you tell someone "leave at nine, you're back for lunch".
• The place you stopped, and the place you should have stopped.

A navigation device does not help with this: it takes you somewhere, it does not keep what you did. A phone app works, as long as you remember to press "start" before setting off — and one day you will forget, on the best ride of the year.

02What a detailed trace is actually for

Repeating. Last year's ride, in reverse, with someone else. You open the trip and you know exactly where you went.

Assembling. Your best sections do not come from the same ride. Having them all lets you build your own loop out of pieces you validated on the bike.

Sharing. "Come out on Sunday" carries far more weight when you can show the loop, its length and its profile.

Documenting. A club run, a rally, a long tour: you keep a dated record of what you did. On a bike you will eventually sell, a coherent ride history tells the story of a machine — and a buyer notices.

Understanding your own use. How many real rides this year? What average distance? Useful when you are wondering whether to keep the bike, or whether the chain kit will last the season.

03Why this needs a device on the bike

A phone app depends on three fragile things: that you remember, that the battery holds, that the phone stays reachable. A device fitted to the bike depends on none of them: the bike rides, the trip is recorded.

HOROTAG ULTIMATE GPS (€399) exists for this: it is the product in the range whose main argument is the detailed trace of every ride, not just a start point and an end point. On a sportsbike, a café racer or a roadster, that is the difference between "I did 280 km" and "here is exactly where I went".

And because it is a tracker, it also does the defensive work:

• Movement alerts when the bike moves without you.
• Trusted zones so your garage and your office car park do not notify you for nothing.
• Riding mode to mute alerts temporarily when you are the one heading out.
• Live tracking and a timestamped PDF theft report if you confirm a theft.
• Three responses to every alert: "this is normal", "I'm checking", "this is a theft".

A café racer parked in town, a sportsbike in an apartment block's underground car park, a roadster left overnight outside a hotel: these are exposed, desirable bikes that load easily into a van. The trace is the pleasure; the anti-theft side is the insurance.

04What it does not do

No spare promises:

• It does not measure your lean angle or grade your riding.
• It does not count engine hours automatically — on both trackers in the range, hours are entered manually in the logbook. The automatic hour meter is HOROTAG RUUVI (€129), and its territory is motocross and enduro.
• It does not immobilise the bike and it does not send SMS messages.

05Choosing between the two trackers

• If your need is knowing where the bike is and being warned when it moves: HOROTAG GPS, €299.
• If your need is that plus the detailed trace of every ride: HOROTAG ULTIMATE GPS, €399.

If you ride for the road itself, the second line is yours. Great roads are not remembered — they are recorded.