A sidecar rig is a different because you have a third wheel and quite a bit of extra weight off to one side. The weight causes your suspension to react differently. A Harley-Davidson like my 92 model has a rigid sidecar wheel and the wheel becomes a fixed point that the rest of the bike pivots around as the suspension is working. When you first start to ride, the sensation is kind of like a truck with bad left shocks. To complicate matters, the added off center weight causes the bike to pull towards the chair during acceleration and away from the chair during deceleration and it gets worse when you have to brake hard. With a right hand mounted sidecar, this translates into a pull to the left during braking and a pull to the right during acceleration.
Turns are always fun. With a right hand mounted rig like mine, right hand turns tend to lift the chair up in the air and left-hand turns tend to push the chair down. Two wheel riders have a tough time understanding this and always believe that the opposite should be true because in their minds I still lean my way through a turn and wouldn't a left-turn lean lift the sidecar up into the air? Two wheelers make a left-turn by forcing the front tire to the right of center of gravity which causes the bike to lean into the turn. This is commonly called counter steer. But I actually steer my way through a turn, something like a four-wheeled vehicle. But I can do more; I can set up the machine and then shift by body weight around to sort of drift through a turn. You'd have to be there to understand.
Rigs with a sprung third wheel are nicer in some ways. You get rid of that "truck with bad left shocks" sensation, but they still suffer from every other problem (or maybe challenge?) that my Harley-Davidson has because you can't get away from your off center weight distribution. I've rode a few and would not trade my Harley-Davidson rig for any of them. I would consider purchasing a Ural as a second machine just because I think they're neat.
If you read all of the junk that I wrote so far then you know by now that the most perfectly aligned sidecar will not track straight in all situations. Matter of fact, a sidecar rig can be deadly to an occasional rider who refuses to lean how his unique machine performs. But, a well set up sidecar rig is a great machine and can be a lot of fun as long as you understand everything that's going on. Your greatest allies are proper maintenance and wheel alignment, education, practice and common since.
Most of today's sidecars (mine included) are attached to a motorcycle that is really not designed for the continuous and off center load that the chair puts on the bike. Many sidecar manufacturers are doing a great job of distributing the extra load through multi-point mounting systems but your suspension, swing arm bushings, wheel bearings and tires are still subjected to much greater loads than an equivalent two wheeled bike. So, you have to do maintenance more frequently and make sure that your alignments are really where they should be.
The more that you learn about your rig and why it handles the way it does, the better chance you have of handling a bad situation when does occur. Also, when something goes wrong or just doesn't feel right, you have a chance to figure out the cause before it hurts you or worse, kills you.
In my opinion, practice is more important than anything else with a sidecar. With a road machine, you have to know what to do when (not if) your sidecar wheel unintentionally comes up in the air and the only way is to practice flying the chair. Most people who practice do so by riding slow figure eight's until the chair comes up. Works great until that scared Wall Mart employee chases you off the parking lot.
I ride a set of roads quite a bit that have a sweeping right turn with a reverse crown in one area and a sweeping right turn and bluff to the right side in another. Both situations caused me to unexpectedly pull the sidecar wheel up and without practice, I would have panicked and possible had a nasty accident. Both times, the chair was lifted by a strong gust of wind which means that I was probably taking the turn fast enough to already have most of the weight off the sidecar wheel without help.
Was I going too fast? Probably, but I was under the posted speed limit and I had taken the turns faster in the past. Was I being stupid? Maybe, but I don't think so. Did I do the right things? Darn right I did. I knew how to put that damn wheel back down in a hurry because I had practiced! The lesson here? Understand what's going on with your machine all of the time and know when you are at risk of flying the chair. It can be great fun until you fly the chair when you're in a sweeping right hand turn on a four lane highway, there is a car to your left and you don't expect it!
