Like the rest of them. I try not to use them but they might save me when I run out of talent or make a mistake.
Odd, I'm definitely the younger rider here and I prefer carb bikes EXACTLY because of how raw and punishing they are if you make a mistake or run out of talent.
That blue bike in my avatar is a retired ex-HRC race bike from some historic class from the E. Coast, it had 17k punishing miles on it but was still in good shape when I got it.
I mainly bought it because it was already built for the track and tuned for our elevation by an ex AMA-racer that was humiliating guys with way newer liter bikes with 2x the HP in open class track days, and to be honest I had more respect for him riding that thing balls-out and sliding the rear out at Pikes Peak raceway or Highplains than seeing replays of his AMA days when he raced against some WSBK riders with all the fancy gadgets on thier bikes.
It started life as a basic CBR600 F4 then got lots of Vortex, HRC, Ohllins etc... parts, it was never fast by modern standards (even for a 600) but it was way more of a thrill than riding an ex AMA BMW S1000RR that I got to ride around Laguna Seca for a few laps and constantly kicked in with clutchless shifting, auto-blip, TC etc... even though it had nearly double the HP it felt muted.
That blue bike was unforgiving (I never named her, and it got sold for parts as I got an unrelated disk/spine injury and can't ride like or as often I used to) and made you accountable for every single move you made on it and that is why I like riding older bikes, my newest bike (fireblade) is from 2003 before all the gizmos took over and gives me a similar feeling to the blue bke but with more HP and torque.
I also feel the same way about cars, I can't stand the way throttle by wire cars with all the TC stuff react, it feels like a video game on a sim rather than a dangerous analogue machine demanding your respect and full attention if you want to take it to the edge (or slightly over) without getting hurt. It forces you to have to get into flow state with it if you want to really meld with it and get the most out of it.
This is why it's not surprising to me that so many sim racers without any real car experience can just jump into a newer 1000hp car with all that tech stuffed into them: its just a plug and play setup that really doesn't reflect talent so much as it does time spent on the simulator. And I say this as a person that spent 1000s of hours on Gran Turismo(s) before the Nismo GT academy made it a thing for this to take place as a kid and young adult. t
I call it the Playstation-ification of motorsports, which while not a bad thing in itself, it definitely marked a certain period of time in which you no longer had to feel what the car was capable of by taking it to it's limits, and possibly crashing, rather than just setting a track specific fuel map, TC setting, and engine braking bias and using throttle input while letting the ECU and engine mapping take over.
Granted this takes place in MotoGP now, too, but this differs in that they race with 350+hp bikes capable of 360kph that are simply not physically capable of being ridden without them by even the best in the World: see Dani Pedrosa's violent crash when his TC was cut.
