The world of sidecars and their owners is a strange one, and it’s one that not many of us normal motorcycle riders ever get to experience. You’re either into outfits or you’re not. However, being a lover of anything resembling a motorcycle I’ve always wanted to have a crack at one and I finally got to scratch the sidecar off my bucket list when I recently sampled Changjiang’s CJ650 Nomad.
Sidecars, to me anyway, are vehicles with all the disadvantages of a car and a motorcycle rolled into one. However, that said, the weekend I spent on the latest three-wheel offering to land on Australian shores was one of the most enjoyable riding weekends I’ve had in a very long time.
Sidecar aficionados will do a lot of eye-rolling while reading this test, I’m sure. However apart from the Nomad’s mechanical and riding credentials, it’s not really a test – or perhaps a machine – aimed at them. As a sidecar newby, I tested the Nomad the only way I knew how: get on, open it up and see how much fun I could wring out of it. And it scored highly against my ‘let it have it’ yardstick.
We’ve been trying to get a
