I took my wife's '02 Monster 620 dark to a track day at Putnam Park over the weekend.

Let me count the ways in which the kickstand sucked:

In the cold of the morning, when you want to warm up an air cooled motor before thrashing it on the track, the kickstand switch prevents you from letting the bike idle unattended. So I had to suit up and sit there on the bike like a goon for ten minutes before the first session. Lame.

At even a moderate pace the tang on the end of the kickstand drags in left hand turns. It drags bad. I was hanging off like a spider monkey, butt completely off the seat, and the kickstand was showering sparks and levering the rear of the bike around. I had to be very careful to set a slow corner entry speed in order to keep from running wide off the track. There's a quarter inch of virgin tire on the rear despite me having worn the kickstand tang down to nub.

In the afternoon, I found my wife's Monster just an inch away from tipping over in the paddock because the kickstand was digging into the soft asphalt in a way no one else's bike was doing.

How hard can it possibly be to engineer a kickstand that does the following three basic things?

1) hold the bike up when it's parked
2) fold out of the way when it's not parked
3) allow you suit up and warm up the bike at the same time