Cyril Green's Motorcycle Memoirs

Down and out

2010-03-19T11:19:00.008+01:00

This is the last available excerpt from Cyril Green's memoirs. There are, I'm sure, many fascinating extracts that we haven't yet seen, but for now, with Cyril lost in the Russian hinterland, his young wife Francesca has asked for some privacy and the diaries remain under lock and key. Thankfully, her gardener, Claudio, is offering great support, in between bouts of expert dibbing, hardening off and pricking out.

From Cyril's memoirs dated 15 April 2008

Ewan and Charlie, eh? Long Way Down? Great entertainment, but I do wish there had been a camera crew on hand when Mr Unlucky himself, Kevin Stott, undertook his ill-advised trip from John O’Groats to Cape Town back in 2003. Had there been, then I’m sure Mr Stott would not now be on the missing persons register.

Stott’s major problem was a terrible sense of direction coupled with the shunning of “high tech cobblers” such as sat-nav and an almost total inability to read a map or use a compass. Nor was his choice of machinery what many would have considered apt. The oil-cooled GSX-R1100 does, indeed, have an admirable reliability record, but once fitted with a turbo and nitrous things are less predictable. And vast experience over many years on high-powered motorcycles… would have been a help. Unfortunately, Stott’s previous bikes included a customised Kawasaki GPz305, an IZH Planeta two-stroke single and – the machine on which he covered most miles – a 2bhp 1958 Phillips Gadabout. Add to this, according to his brother, that Stott’s mechanical abilities were negligible and his attitude to maintenance negligent, the odds were rather stacked against him.

The journey seemed to go smoothly for several weeks, but then things turned sour. Having been lost for many days in a remote wilderness, Stott’s provisions were almost exhausted, thanks mainly to poor planning and incessant snacking, though basing supplies largely around Sugar Puffs and Dr Pepper was never a great idea in the first place, especially for a 19-stone diabetic. With his petrol reserves almost spent, he crested a hill and saw a settlement in the distance. Crying with relief (we know such details thanks to the survival of his video diaries) Stott descended towards signs of life, no doubt hopeful of salvation.

However, it was clear from the outset that this lumbering, weeping outsider was regarded with suspicion at best, open aggression being the overriding reaction from any of the locals he approached. He didn’t know the language and they clearly didn’t understand him. That night he slept fitfully in the open alongside his GSX-R.

Speaking to his video diary, Stott, apparently affecting the tones of a Victorian explorer, said: ‘I have had no luck in finding either food or fuel. Everyone I approach seems to bare their teeth and bark rebukes, which although I cannot fathom are clearly warnings to stay away. This afternoon, feeling delirious with thirst, craving simply water, I stumbled into what appeared to be a meeting place for males of the community. But although they each clutched a beaker of some strange, dark concoction, I was offered none and the elder, clearly in charge and standing in a small, raised enclosure, failed to understand my pleas. In desperation, I reached for the drink of a younger man sitting nearby, but I was heavily beaten and thrown out into the mud. I shall try again tomorrow, but this evening I have supped on some water from a puddle to help wash down the last of the Sugar Puffs. Thank God I didn’t bring Alpen as my mother had advised.’

Things didn’t get much better, as an entry from the following day testified: ‘Today was terrible. I had left the bike outside what appeared to be a primitive version of what we might call a grocer's and when I emerged, empty handed, I saw the bike being pushed away by a group of dirty, wretched children. As I came near they managed to start it and the largest rode it away, several others on the pillion, gesticulating wildly. I fear I shall not see it again. Later, I wandered into a steamy, filthy shack in which a local woman was stirring all manner of unrecognisable foodstuffs in a vat of boiling oil. But having no money of any kind, I could not convince her to part with even the smallest item, not even by bartering with my Wee Willy. Is this it? Is this where I shall end my days, in this Godforsaken hell-hole?’

The answer seems to be yes, as Stott was never heard of again. And the saddest aspect of this tale? He hadn’t even made it out of Britain. The remains of Stott’s GSX-R, stripped to the bare frame, was found in a suburb of Glasgow. But in funny sort of way I’ve been inspired by Kevin Stott to make an epic journey of my own, except I plan to travel north from John O’Groats, deep into the Arctic Circle then strike out east into Russia. Watch this space.

Fannying about

2010-03-05T12:16:00.007+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 4 April 2008

'BSA enters sex toy industry' is not a headline you’re likely to have seen, but only because fate dealt the project an early conclusion, to the relief of women everywhere, I should imagine.

In late 1963 BSA was pretty healthy, but the smarter people high up knew that the future held stiff challenges. To that end, a scheme was set up for workers to put forward ideas, which could be as wide-ranging as their imaginations (which, given mid-1960s Birmingham, led to a pretty conservative haul). However, among the two-stroke shopping trolleys and automated dog bathers was a racy suggestion for a, well… a motorised phallus. BSA had a reputation in some circles for being a stuffy firm, but there must have been something in the tea that week because a development engineer was put straight onto it, so to speak. Although phallic pleasuring devices are as old as mankind itself, the first battery-powered ‘widow’s comforter’ was still a few years away, so there was certainly a hole in the market, and BSA intended to fill it.

A lad was sent up to Soho and returned, still blushing, with a duffle bag full of samples ranging from the ludicrous to the frankly unfeasible. The development team disappeared into the workshop and after a few months of intense beavering a fully functional prototype was ready.

Development manager Terry Sheldon presented the creation to a special assembly of the board and managers, but initial impressions weren’t good. Many were surprised by the sheer bulk of the thing, made clear when Sheldon yelped on trapping his finger beneath it when heaving it onto the boardroom table. The ‘business end’ looked normal enough, complete with convincing veins and ridges, but the alloy casing beneath, equipped with steel grab handles sporting fat, anti-vibe grips, made the thing look like a two-horsepower AC generator – with a knob on it – an image only enhanced when, to everyone's horror, Sheldon turned a petcock, grasped a pull cord and yanked the beast into life.

After the initial shock, someone shouted above the din that the banshee wail of a 25cc two-stroke engine running on pre-mix would take some explaining to the neighbours, and by the time the 'Beeza Buzza' had vibed its way across the polished boardroom table, leaving an unsightly gouge, most people had left the haze-filled room
in dismay.

In late April 1964 we were summoned once again and this time Terry Sheldon placed a much more compact contraption on the table. He explained how he’d worked closely with the chaps at Joseph Lucas to come up with a battery-powered alternative, the 'Beeza Teeza'. But initial enthusiasm began to sour when Sheldon produced a battery pack the size of a large loaf. He strapped this to his waist then, using cables and clamps akin to jump leads, he connected it to the 'spinster's companion' which sprang into life with a fizz of blue sparks. Sheldon gripped the thing with grim determination while maintaining a bravado grin, despite quite clearly having his teeth rattled.

Now, I’m no expert on these matters, but I have to say that the movement created by the various cams and cranks would have been sufficient to mix a small batch of concrete and the thought of it going anywhere near a person’s more delicate regions was quite disturbing. Very quickly, the room began to fill with a smell familiar to generations of youngsters, that of burning-out Scalextric cars, and we watched in bafflement as Sheldon, his vision now blurred beyond use, grappled with the beast in an effort to switch it off. Thankfully, the Small Heath fire brigade swiftly brought the resulting blaze
under control.

Unbelievably, Sheldon was given one last crack at it and in early August he brought us together one last time in the refurbished board room. This, it was clear from the start, showed far more promise. Very compact for the day, weighing just four pounds, it gained nods of approval as it was passed around the various members. Then, with not a little showmanship, Sheldon produced an ‘adapted’ honeydew melon, inserted the device, turned a Bakelite knob and off it went, thrumming away happily as Sheldon slid it in and out with some skill. However, batteries weren’t then what they are now, and within about a minute the 'Beez-o-Gasm' was struggling in its death throes like a giant drowning slug.

It was quickly decided that 60 seconds with a floundering gastropod would not be sufficient to pleasure even the most desperate of ladies and that far more fun could be had in a couple of miles on the pillion of any of the wildly vibratory BSA range. Sheldon was suspended on full pay pending enquiries.

Splash it all over

2010-02-19T12:07:00.006+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 2 March 2008

The Dakar Rally is an awe-inspiring event for many reasons, not least because the desert does strange things to a man. I know - from
bitter experience.

On a scorching day in August 1999, as the sun beat down, I knelt by the side of the XT600, staring at a flat rear tyre. Sweat dripped from the tip of my nose and landed in the dust, evaporating almost instantly. I felt defeated and lonely and for the first time since I was a boy I clasped my hands together and prayed, concluding my silent plea by leaning back and shouting up at the vast azure sky. ‘Why, oh God? Why me? Why now? Why?!’

‘Oh Cyril, get a grip.’ It was Francesca. ‘Drink your tea and then get Stefano over with his mobile tyre thingy if you can’t do it yourself. You have to get it done by tomorrow else you’ll miss the ferry. What a drama queen.’ Three days later, thanks to Stefano, I'd made the trip from my home in the Testa di Cazzo hills and was actually in
the desert.

The trip had been planned for months, a ride through Tunisia, Algeria and Mali to Timbuktu, via Tuat (merely because the name made us laugh). The other half of ‘us’ was Stewart Kidd, a brawny off-road specialist developing Yamaha’s two-wheel-drive 2-Trac system fitted to a test mule. I’d pulled strings to get myself on this trip as it was my final year before retirement and the chance was too good to miss. Let’s not talk about hindsight, it makes fools of us all.

I knew Stewart, though not well, from his regular dealings with the R&D department and he’d always seemed like a nice bloke, if a little intense. Nothing wrong with that, I thought, a serious approach in unforgiving terrain was fine by me, gritty sandwiches and a few beach races being my only sand experience up until that point.

Five days in, deep into the desert, we reached a rocky plain on the edge of a mountain range and set up camp as the sky darkened and brilliant stars began to emerge. We cooked and ate, drank a few tots of whisky, then lay back to gaze at the firmament. I’ll admit that I’ve had my cod-philosophical moments when staring up at the night sky, usually worse for wear, but Stewart suddenly became very
strange indeed.

‘Cyril, do you realise that every time you pleasure yourself, your Lord and God is watching?’

‘I’m sorry?’ I said, startled, but not sure if I’d heard him correctly.

‘The Lord, your God, Cyril. Our God. We all must answer to him at some point.’ His voice had gone all boomy, like a very hammy vicar.

‘Yes, yes, that’s true... I suppose,’ I said, playing for time. ‘Although for now I’d concentrate on answering to Mr Kunasawa, who’s especially interested in the outcome of this test.’

Stewart then stood up and, despite the chilly air, threw aside his jacket and pulled off his T-shirt. In the firelight I could see a sprawling tattoo on his chest and abdomen. It was the face of Christ.

‘Christ!’ I blurted, in surprise rather than recognition, given that the face looked looked more like Elton John's and I only twigged that it was meant to be Jesus because of the crown of thorns. Flippin' marvellous, I thought. I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere with a full-on religious nutter. Great.

‘Our Lord Barry sees all,’ he said, stretching his arms wide.

‘Barry? Is that meant to be Barry Sheene?’ I asked, squinting at the tattoo. ‘I doubt he’d be very flattered if he saw it, Stewart.’

He then fiddled around in a pannier and pulled out a small bottle, proclaiming, ‘Let us anoint our bodies with the sacred liquid. Cyril, cleanse your sins!’ And with that he sprinkled this stuff on me as I cowered by the fire. I wiped a spot of it from my face and took a tentative sniff, wary of what it might be, but there was no doubt about it – Brut 33 aftershave.

Then, with no further ceremony, but with an air of urgency, Stewart rode off into the night and I had to make my own way home. Ten days later he turned up at Yamaha HQ in Surrey as if nothing had happened, filed his report and no more was said about the incident. However, when Barry died in 2003, they found Stewart in his own back garden, attached to a huge crucifix wearing a set of vintage Sheene Heron Suzuki leathers. He was perfectly okay (physically), having climbed into the leathers after nailing them to the cross – sacrilege in itself, some might say. The whole scene reeked of
cheap aftershave.

Booby Prize

2010-02-05T12:31:00.003+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 25 January 2008

It’s the Cyril Green Review of 2007. Absolutely worthless, just like most of the recipients. Just in case these memoirs ever see the light of day, I shall have to undertake a certain amount of fudging (as a former GP racer once said to an unfortunate brolly dolly).

Stupidest Factory Test Rider Prang
We’ve all ogled a nice pert bottom while riding through town (though when I moved to Italy the pertness and ogle-potential went off the scale and after several near misses I now ride under a self-imposed gawp ban), but we’re not all testing the new fuel injection on a Triumph Thruxton. Witnesses say that in March a certain GD was still eyes right as he jammed the bike into the back of a Whippy King ice cream van just outside the otherwise sleepy Sheepy Magna in Leicestershire. Local plod initially shocked and confused by significant raspberry sauce spillage.

Most Drunken Executive
The Germans do quite a few things very well indeed. Among them sausages, marching, stringingwordstogethertomakeanewword, boxer engines and beer drinking. Thankfully, BM’s upper management has changed since the Gunter Blasen penile-jousting incident [see 'I want to show you my big cock', December '08], so in May I was lucky enough to be invited to a closed test session near Hamburg for the BMW HP2 Sport. At the close of a celebratory dinner to mark the end of pre-production testing, I watched through rather ‘refreshed’ eyes as SK tapped his glass to attract the attention of the room, declared his love for everyone there and proclaimed the HP2 Sport as the sexiest bike he’d ever seen. He then stumbled across to the display bike, sitting on a low plinth, took out his old chap and inserted it in the exhaust pipe, attempting to clamber aboard from behind, trousers round his ankles, feet scrabbling on the back tyre like a randy terrier trying to mount a labrador. Within seconds he was asleep, slumped over the bike and ignored by everyone.

Most Ridiculous Law
Here in Italy, we motorcyclists narrowly avoided being electronically tagged in the war against crime. Alarmed at the number of attacks or getaways in which bikes or scooters are involved, Romano Prodi’s government proposed the insertion beneath the skin of the upper arm a data chip identifying the rider and linking he or she to the bike they’re on. The plan was scrapped in June when it turned out that of the 15 people involved in the six-month trial, one’s identity continually registered as a 73-year-old woman who’d died in 2004 and four had their arms cut off by mafia gangs keen on identity theft. All’s now gone quiet after talk of ‘teething troubles’.

Most Futile Record Attempt
In August, Kurac Shupcino from Split made a bid to enter the Croatian Book of Records as the rider to have completed a lap of the Zagreb ringroad in the shortest time while eating a king-sized govno (a spicy pasty and local delicacy). Not only did Kurac die in the process after a chunk of crust blew down his windpipe at 140mph as he crossed the line, but he was robbed of posthumous glory as the new record was deemed invalid due to the pasty being beef and onion rather than the regulation mutton and beetroot.

Biggest Waste of Money
In November, it came to my attention that a certain Japanese factory had finally washed its hands of a failed project having spent more than 340m Yen (£1.5m) trying to perfect a viable on-bike urinal – working title, the Eezy Weezy. Apparently, they were finally scuppered by the crazy safety lobby when unable to demonstrate the safe extraction of the John Thomas while on the move. What ridiculous killjoys.

Worst Home Mechanic
Finally, in December came the story of the DIY servicer who, during an oil change, poured almost four litres of 15w 50 into his Ducati’s filler before realising that it was forming in a pool beneath the bike as he’d forgotten to replace the sump plug. Stepping back in horror he trod on the edge of the tray of waste oil, spilling the lot on the floor, before slipping on the mess, knocking over the bike and breaking his thumb (much to the disappointment of his energetic young wife). Step forward, please, the idiot that is Mr Cyril Green of Montemona, Italy.

The Japanese VIP

2010-01-22T12:50:00.003+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 4 January 2008

The freakishly wonderful Suzuki B-King has brought back mixed emotions. You see, I once had close dealings with a certain Haru Jakamashi from Suzuki HQ, who went on to be a key figure in the B-King’s birth. When we set off on a road trip together in the spring of 1996 it should have been the start of a long friendship and a fruitful working relationship. Instead, it was a disaster.

Mr Jakamashi doesn’t have a motorcycle licence. He raced in his youth, but for our journey to a European Suzuki summit in Valencia he was to ride pillion. He was flying in from Hamamatsu and I was to pick him up from Heathrow on a then newly-launched 1200S Bandit. However, I have a confession.

The maintenance department had entrusted me to carry out the bike’s first service myself at home and, of course, I left things till the evening before the trip. By 11pm I was all done, when, having changed the oil as part of the service, I decided to recheck the sump plug. I’d lent out my torque wrench so I was using guesswork as I applied a little... more... pressure to the spanner. It's quite odd, looking back, that the thought of stripping the thread and it actually happening seemed to occur simultaneously. A sweat broke out down my back.

I’ve always been a bodger and opted for one I’d once used on a Kawasaki Z900. I opened a bottle of plonk, poured myself a glass, poured another, then, after a little trimming I screwed the cork into the sump. So long as I didn’t cane the Bandit, and I had no intention to with a high-ranking Japanese suit on the back, I felt sure the cork would stay in place till I got back.

There hadn’t been time to fit hard luggage except for a top box, so I used soft throwovers. At the airport, Mr Jakamashi and I had a bit of a tiff straight off when he insisted that the panniers be adjusted way down so they weren’t interfering with the backs of his thighs. Maybe he had a Cordura phobia, but eventually he was happy and off we went.

The overnight crossing from Portsmouth to Bilbao was interesting. The demure Mr Jakamashi found his voice after a bottle of Chardonnay and several large cognacs, and we spent two hours in the karaoke lounge duelling with some footie lads on the way to a game. When we staggered back to our shared cabin (an administrative error we decided to endure) my honourable Japanese companion rounded off the night by chundering into my shoes.

The next day he was moving very slowly as we set off across Spain. Twice he fell asleep against my back before I insisted on bungeeing him to the top box for his own safety. Later, on the A68 just north-west of Zaragoza, people started flashing us as we overtook them. Disgruntled do-gooders infuriated by our speed, I thought. Until, in the right mirror, I noticed the flames.

It’s remarkable how long it takes to get a bungeed fat bloke off the back off a bike, especially when he’s hung over and panicking as flames from a burning pannier lick at his right buttock. Moments later, as we stamped on smouldering clothing on the hard shoulder, my suggestion that it was his fault for insisting the panniers were adjusted down so far that one had touched the exhaust didn’t go down too well. It was salt in the wound, given that the charred remains were all his. My clothes were in the other pannier.

The rest of the ride down was tortured. We hardly spoke. Then on the last evening after the conference we made friends again in a drunken haze. Mr Jakamashi had cheered himself up on a shopping spree, feeling especially proud of a hugely expensive pair of hand-made Spanish shoes. Once again we took to the karaoke, duetting, in a fit of hysterics, to Arthur Brown’s ‘Fire’.

The next morning, I was outside the hotel checking the straps on what was left of the panniers as the Bandit warmed up on the sidestand. Mr Jakamashi emerged, looking very swish in all his new clothes, ready to take a taxi to the airport. We shook hands across the thrumming bike.

‘We have good time together,’ he smiled, and I could see a rosy future for me at Suzuki after all. ‘I like this bike very much!’

And with that he gave the throttle a slightly cack-handed twist, the revs hit the limiter, there was a dull pop and three litres of hot oil disgorged themselves onto Mr Jakamashi’s brand new tan suede monkstrap shoes. I left Suzuki in the autumn of that year.

Binky's Folly

2010-01-08T12:56:00.002+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 11 December 2007

‘Gentlemen, it is our destiny, our duty, to present the world not merely with the bike of tomorrow, but with the Bike of the Future.’ Fine, all very Raymond Baxter, but when I tell you that those words echoed around the boardroom not of Suzuki when perhaps planning the new Hayabusa, of Yamaha or even Hinckley Triumph, but of late Sixties Meriden Triumph then you’ll understand the irony. And for once, my freakish friend Peter Cartwright (of dog shaving, turd harvesting and duck pond rampage infamy) wasn’t involved, though thanks only to a court order.

It’s hard to believe that project Jet Bike was ever allowed to take off. Had things gone differently, who knows? We could all now be hurtling around on 350mph hovering missiles with all the control of a discount supermarket trolley stacked with white cider and pushed by a crack-whore teen mother.

The fun began in autumn 1968. Triumph was on the brink of financial disaster, plodding away with outdated designs and haunted, on the eve of its debut, by the overhead camshaft Honda CB750. Many of us at the firm thought that work ought to be progressing on a DOHC four, but people higher up had rather more ambitious ideas.

Harry ’Binky’ Tuttle was a recently appointed development engineer and, being middle-aged and with his biological clock ticking loudly, was desperate to make a name for himself. Ex-RAF, he claimed to be a close friend of jet engine genius, Frank Whittle, and bamboozled the Board into assigning him a small team and large budget.

Suspicions should have been raised within the first month. An aircraft hangar just outside Coventry had been leased and was surrounded by secrecy. However, word got out of dangerous experimentation, terrible near-misses and a reckless attitude to test rider safety. Then suddenly the plans were shelved and nothing more was said about it, but about 20 years later at the NEC Show I bumped into one of the chaps who’d been drafted in to work on the project, Keith Potts, and after a few pints of slop from the NEC bar, he spoke freely about those dark days.

The thing was a shambles from the start, he told me. Tuttle’s child-like impatience clouding any judgement he might once have had. The Jet Bike was an awful lash-up. What you might imagine to be something perhaps slightly larger than a modern-day jet ski was, in fact, a huge turbine fitted with rudimentary controls. The rider straddled it, like sitting over a large barrel and, influenced by the relatively new Hawker Harrier ‘Jump Jet’, swivelling vanes at the side allowed a vertical take-off. All very well in theory.

Within the first two weeks of testing a ‘working’ prototype there were several regrettable incidents: one rider was hospitalised after ascending ‘like a bleedin’ rocket’ and hitting the hangar roof; a visiting Triumph manager was rushed to casualty when a fierce blowback melted his Terylene trousers to his legs; a technician required first aid after a pork pie was sucked from Tuttle's hand and through the turbine, thwacking the man in the face and knocking out two teeth; and Biggles the aerodrome cat was ‘hoovered up like a rag’ and deposited as a multicoloured mural on the hangar wall.

However, the project continued, draining Meriden’s already paltry funds, until the day the Board came to see the Jet Bike in action. Remember, this was meant to be the prototype of a big-selling street bike and although the idea of hovering had by then been quashed, the thing instead using wheels, it was still far from viable. The directors watched in horror as a man dressed in a fireproof suit used a small stepladder to mount the beast, perching precariously on a thick asbestos saddle. Retractable outriggers kept the machine upright, as the rider’s feet were now a foot or more above the floor. The jet was fired up, its turbine hit a high wailing whistle and the directors stared slack-jawed as the monster moved slowly forward. Unfortunately, only one of the outriggers retracted correctly, the other snagging at the ground as the bike rapidly picked up speed. The thing went into an writhing death-weave but continued up the two-mile straight, by now hitting well over 150mph and still accelerating.

The fireball that rose on the horizon seemed a poignant illustration of Meriden Triumph’s fortunes, and before anyone had the chance to sack him, Harry Tuttle had scarpered, never to be heard of again.

Longmore Way Down

2009-12-18T13:00:00.003+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 4 November 2007

‘Cuppa tea mate?’ Those words, in an unmistakable Black Country twang, were uttered to me a few years back by Lee Longmore, swiftly followed by, ‘Wait there mate and arl getcha a bacon sarnie. Brown sauce or red?’ All of which would have been extremely welcome if at the time I hadn’t been trapped beneath a Yamaha R6, having been skittled off in a South London street by, I kid you not, a transvestite dwarf on a minimoto. Lee Longmore was not that dwarf. He was far stranger than that.

I first met Lee in a San Francisco coffee shop. Well, I say I met him, but in fact he sat across from me on a low sofa, dressed in running kit, including very short shorts, his legs sprawled wide in a rather forced show of masculinity. It was difficult to know whether or not his genital display was accidental or for my benefit (maybe my leathers had caught his eye?), in any case, the boys were certainly out of the barracks and remained so until the arrival of a young couple he knew, the woman looking rather unnerved having, on her approach, also been treated to Lee’s ‘last turkey in the shop’ impression. I rode away from the coffee shop and didn’t expect to see Lee again, so when I came round in that Clapham street and found him standing over me I was relieved that his full leathers covered all eventualities.

Since that day, I’ve got to know Lee pretty well – linked, as we are, by a love of motorcycles. He was one of the first to buy a Triumph Daytona 675, putting in his order after reading the pre-launch article in Bike (foolhardy given his renown gullibility. He once spent an evening drinking Tennant’s LA, assuming it was a trendy beer named after the Californian city, and was confused as to why he remained sober). Shortly after buying the Triumph, he rode to Italy to visit me and Francesca and I found him a slightly freakish guest. At one point I could have sworn he was wearing bike boots as he clomped around upstairs, but it was his normal, bare-footed Frankensteinian stomp.

He also brought along several Airfix kits, over which I’d catch him hunched in the small hours, like an obsessive elf. He brought a rope ladder, which he attached to the balcony of his attic room and kept rolled but ready for action, ‘merely as a precaution, Cyril’. And he insisted on ‘tweaking’ my computer, claiming to be a professional who wrote Triumph’s ignition and fuelling maps (a blatant lie). It cost me a packet to have the labyrinthine chaos unravelled by a real professional, who handed it back with a pained expression, saying that unravelling the mess had been like ‘peering into the mind of a psychopath’. Perhaps Lee really should write fuelling maps.

But you couldn’t wish to meet a nicer psychopath and that week, while Lee stayed with us at our modest house in Montemona, we went on some great blasts together in the Testa di Cazzo hills, he being a brisk and smooth rider, though far too keen to advertise his Advanced Motorcycling certificate (‘Cyril, you might think, What’s that child’s bike doing there? I think, Where’s the child!’).

It was rather sad what happened to Lee Longmore on his return to London. His behaviour became increasingly erratic, he put on weight and would be seen cruising the streets on his Daytona wearing overly-tight designer clothes better suited to a man half his age, and, in warm weather, a large and unsightly sweat patch swamping his back. He rigged up a PA system to the bike and would ‘talk’ his route for the benefit of the general public, spreading the Advanced Motorcycling gospel.

Then one day, this normally mild-mannered man simply flipped. Approached at traffic lights in Cricklewood by a tramp asking for spare change, Lee stepped off the bike, letting it crash to the ground, threw his helmet to the floor and challenged the shocked tramp to a fight. When the tramp backed away, Lee took out his frustration on the bike, laying into it with fists and boots. When the police arrived the bike was in flames and he was in tears, squatting in the gutter stripped to his underpants, trendy clothes burning along with his beloved Daytona, sobbing ‘I shoulda bought a f***** Mini’. If only I’d been there to offer the poor chap a nice cuppa tea.

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah

2009-12-04T09:30:00.007+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 22 September 2007

I took the Multistrada to Florence the other day, sent on an errand by Francesca. The sun was beating down, the skies were blue and the Duke was running sweetly. What could possibly go wrong? Ha!

I headed across country and by the time I reached the town of Radda in Chianti both the bike and I were warm and into our stride. I've lived in Italy for almost seven years and have come to accept that the majority of Italian riders and drivers have as much a concept of risk as they do of a chip butty. They seem to know no fear. I’m amazed that Italian men can walk without pushing before them a small wheeled trolley, given the apparent size of their balls. But then, fear doesn't come into it, because fear requires you to believe that some day your luck will run out.

I was humming along at a decent pace when I noticed headlights in my mirror. There was a series of bends coming up, in the middle of which, I knew, was a humpback bridge set at 45 degrees to the road. With the first right-hander approaching, I drifted left to the centreline and was about to pitch in at about 80mph when a horn blared and an Aprilia Tuono carved past on a mission. Well, my adrenal gland may be rather withered, but there's still a bit of juice in it yet and I took up the challenge, hoping that the increasingly tight turns and uneven surface would, for a while at least, help me to stay in touch with the thundering Aprilia.

But the other chap was really on it, using all of the road even when you'd have needed to be clairvoyant to know it was safe. By the bridge, I knew my capacity for lunacy was lacking and backed off. A good decision. The Tuono pitched into the left-hander very early, using the other side of the road, just as an Alfa saloon coming the other way appeared from behind the bridge's stone parapet. The rider picked up the bike and manfully tried to wrestle it down again in time to make the bend, but clipped the bridge wall and was pitched into the air, landing quite gracefully flat on his back in the long grass at the side of the road. The Alfa driver wouldn't have seen any of this and carried on. I pulled over and dashed to where the rider lay.

He hadn't moved and when I flipped up his black visor he didn't seem to be breathing. I felt for a pulse and found nothing, so unzipped his leathers ready to give heart massage. Well, that's when things all went a bit wonky.

As I pulled down the zip I suddenly felt as if I was in a Seventies aftershave advert, because not only was there no other clothing beneath the leathers, but an ample pair of breasts lost no time in escaping their confinement. He was clearly a she. Perhaps out of a deep-seated sense of guilt, owed mainly, I suspect, to that incident with Auntie Margaret when I was 12, my first reaction was to zip up the leathers. I was in the process of herding the escapees back into their leathery pen when the woman sat bolt upright and pulled off her helmet to reveal a tumble of raven hair and fierce green eyes. Ah...

Back home, Francesca eased a packet of frozen peas into my underpants in an attempt to halt the swelling and bruising (the old family jewels were rapidly resembling a couple of small mangos and a saveloy). She asked me to repeat exactly what I'd said to the woman. I admit that my Italian isn't what it might be, despite my years here, and with the awkwardness of the situation I became a little tongue tied. When Francesca had stopped giggling she explained that the English equivalent of what I'd blurted out would be, 'I'm very sorry, but I thought you were dead and I was chasing your lively breasts.' That's the last time I play the good Samaritan. I felt a right tit. Left one, too.

Too much monkey business

2009-11-20T09:08:00.006+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 14 September 2007

Speed, to me, will always mean Bonneville Salt Flats. And prison food. The other evening Francesca and I were rooting away in the store room at the back of my office, getting up a good old sweat humping and humping box after box of old papers and documents from years back. I managed to drop one and amongst the spillage I noticed a notebook from a trip to Bonneville during my days at Suzuki. I've reprinted some of that notebook here, and hope that, should this memoir ever see the light of day, I'm not sued by any of those still in a position to do so.

15 June 1980: Finally, after some outrageous bribery, the warders have given me back my notebook. How do I describe the catastrophic events of the past five days? From the beginning, I suppose. So...

10 June 1980: We fly into Salt Lake City and collect the hire car. There's immediately an argument as to who will drive, with Barry [Sheene] insisting that it's him. I tell him I'd heard enough stories of what he and Stavros [Steve Parrish] had got up to with hire cars and hand the keys to our chief technician, Don Prior. Barry goes into a sulk in the back of the car and all the way to Bonneville lets go of silent but utterly nauseating farts, chuckling each time we’re forced to wind down the Chevrolet's windows in panic.

Check into the hotel and meet with the rest of the crew. The bike and spares are here, having been shipped over ahead of us. I remind everyone of Suzuki's desire to keep this under wraps, hence the unliveried bike and choosing a relatively quiet time at the salt flats. We're not here to break records, but we do want to push this bike to the limit. Early night, big day tomorrow. Passing through the bar I wish Barry goodnight. He calls me a c***. Light heartedly, I'm sure.

11 June 1980: This morning Barry puts in some very high speed runs before complaining of a loss of power. Don Prior begins to take a look, but even under the awning the sun’s heat is intense and he's clearly flustered. With uncharacteristic clumsiness he pulls the bike on top of himself, taking a heavy blow to the head. He insists all is okay, but it was a mighty knock and he has a cut that might need stitches, so I send him with one of the mechanics to get a check up with a doctor in town. He returns two hours later with a bemused mechanic and a chimpanzee ventriloquist’s dummy which is dressed in a Stetson hat, fringed leather chaps and blue waistcoat, complete with sheriff's badge. Don assures me that he's feeling fine. Or rather, Mr Kenny Roberts the Chimp assures me.

12 June 1980: Don comes down to breakfast with Mr Kenny Roberts on his arm and speaks only through the dummy throughout. This sets the pattern for the day, with the chimp advising Don on carb settings and revised ignition timing. Don clearly finds it awkward working with a dummy on his left hand, but when Barry suggests he 'put the fackin' monkey down' Don becomes agitated and we let him get on with it.

After lunch, Barry threatens to refuse to ride unless 'that bloody lunatic puts down the fackin' chimp and gets on with his bleedin' job'. In the event, Barry relents, but the afternoon session comes to a premature halt when salt crystals are sucked into the engine, damaging the bore and a valve seat on number one pot. A heated row develops between Don Prior and Mr Kenny Roberts, Don castigating the puppet-chimp for advising they run without air filters.

It's now late in the evening and Barry and I are enjoying a few drinks in the hotel bar. Then Don appears, having worked on the motor all evening, and still with Mr Kenny Roberts on his arm, its synthetic fur matted with grease and looking rather worse for wear. As does Don.

Barry, choosing the diplomatic route as ever, says: 'Don, I've had enough of this. You've bleedin' cracked. Give me the fackin' monkey, I'll fackin' put an end to this bollocks.' With which he lunges at the dummy and a bitter struggle ensues, during which tables are knocked over, with glasses crashing to the floor. Finally, Barry bursts free from Don, triumphantly holding aloft the head of Mr Kenny Roberts.

'That's it. It's fackin' over, you nutter,' he shouts, throwing the head across the bar with some force. Unfortunately, it ricochets off the jukebox and bounces onto a table, knocking a drink into the lap of the local chief of police, who’s been watching the whole sordid performance.

So, there you have it. We were all eventually released after paying substantial fines and while at least some of the work we carried out at Bonneville did find its way, many years later, onto the Hayabusa, Don Prior was never quite the same again, though he did complete a successful 1981 summer season with a refurbished Mr Kenny Roberts as Kenny and Don on Blackpool’s north pier.

Morag McCuddie

2009-11-06T09:44:00.006+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 19 August 2007

I recently read an article about haggis stalking in the Scottish Highlands, and it took me right back to the late 1990s, a tuned Yamaha V-Max and Morag McCuddie, fearsome Queen of the Lathe.

Morag is an engineering legend within the industry yet all but unknown outside it. This could be down to her outright strangeness, but I'd say that makes her interesting. She’s certainly always interested me – but not in the way you might think. She stands six feet four and even now, in her 70s, has the physique of a Clydeside riveter, complete with ham-sized, hirsute forearms. She always wears a kilt, exposing mighty legs, and I certainly wouldn’t like to see those broad, calloused hands tossing anything less substantial than a caber.

We first met in 1958 when I was working for Ariel and we immediately got along well. I’d been sent to her workshops in Oban on Scotland's rugged west coast to convince her to try to iron out problems with the new Ariel Leader that had flummoxed the chaps at the factory. Morag was either idiosyncratic, an imaginative liar or plainly mad, depending on your view. During that first meeting she told me that she’d built the great Bob McIntyre entirely from spares and insisted that he only managed to pull off the previous year’s first ever 100mph TT lap thanks to last-minute tweaks she’d made to his pelvic oil galleries.

It was a lovely day in that summer of ’58 and she invited me to join her for a jaunt into the hills on scramblers. We rode for a couple of hours then stopped on a hilltop to admire the view, our bikes pinging in the background as they cooled. Morag turned to me with a wink and I watched as she reached down and opened the flaps of her knapsack. She reached in and pulled out a couple of mighty smoked salmon sandwiches and, more importantly, a large bottle of Glenfelch single malt whisky (label motto, “Ye'll sup more wi' a straw!”).

Well, my hazy memories of the rest of that afternoon come to me only in brief and seemingly unconnected episodes, like clicking aimlessly through YouTube. I know we wrestled, and I know that at least part of that wrestling took place naked. I know that we also rode the bikes in the buff and that for some of the time I wore a slice of smoked salmon both as a wig and a loincloth. The next morning, I could hardly move for midge bites, my skin a Square Four workshop manual in Braille. And to this day I have a scar on my right buttock in the shape of the exhaust heatshield on Morag’s B33. It has become a ritual that every time I see her I have to show this brand (I’m convinced she did it on purpose when I was comatose), at which point she roars with gravelly laughter and slaps me on the back with the force of a dockside crane.

So, jump forward to 1998 and my arrival in Oban to bring details of work Morag was to take on for Yamaha (my then employers). As usual, she mulled over the proposal for no more than ten minutes before suggesting a drink. She went to the courtyard at the back of the house and appeared from one of the outbuildings on her tuned V-Max. At Morag’s insistence I foolishly left my R1 at the house and climbed on the back.

By the time we reached the Beaver and Merkin I was in need of a drink and the first few pints of Grainger’s Disgraced Ghillie slipped down with unseemly haste. Before I knew it, we were deep in our cups and Morag was demanding I bear my buttock to show the heatshield scar. Despite the crowded tap room I did just that. But even after all those years I wasn’t prepared for the hearty slap on the back and, leather jeans like shackles around my ankles, I stumbled forwards, hit my head on the bar and was knocked out cold.

Apparently, Morag McCuddie collected me up like a rag doll, and without even bothering to pull up my trousers threw me over the back of the V-max, cowboy style, and rode home through the town. What happened between then and the next morning I have no idea, but I can tell you that the long ride back down south on the R1 involved a rather ridiculous number of comfort breaks.

Fox me! Fox me!

2009-10-23T10:12:00.008+02:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 17 July 2007

Glencrutchery this and Cronk-y-Voddy that has brought back vivid and frankly unsettling memories of the TT.

In 1998 I was there with Yamaha, meeting others from the industry for an annual pow-wow. A friend of mine, Paul Carlton, was racing a FireBlade in the Production TT as a privateer, so one morning after the first early practice of the week I went over to the paddock to see how he’d got on.

Well, poor old Paul was in a bit of a state. His mechanic, the only other member of his two-man team, had gone down with something tropical involving worms and orifices after an adventure holiday in Belize and would have to rest his spectacularly enlarged scrotum on a soft pillow for at least two weeks. I promised Paul I’d put the word out to see what could be done. That, as it turned out, was my mistake.

Steve ‘Deadly’ Davies came recommended via a friend of a colleague’s brother and warning bells should have rung when I sought him out at the campsite in Peel. His tent was draped with an army camouflage net and a crudely home-made flag fluttered above it bearing the barely legible words scrawled in marker pen, “Swift and Bald”. It later transpired that it was actually “Swift and Bold”, not his favourite two washing powders but the motto of the Royal Green Jackets, of which he claimed to be a former member. I tapped on the ridge pole and out stumbled a ginger-haired man dressed in a tartan dressing gown and huge slippers shaped like penguins. He clearly had no shame, something that would become apparent as the week wore on.

I left him to get dressed and when I returned to ride together to Douglas so Steve could meet Paul, he was dressed in garish full leathers made up of a patchwork of colours, making him look like a cross between a jester and a bean bag. But next to him stood a beautiful and elegant woman who, inexplicably, turned out to be his wife, Sacha (affectionately known as Basha, for reasons unrepeatable here). I was with my own lovely young wife, Francesca. We’d been married for just nine months and were virtually inseparable (literally so at one point, but that was a rare spasm and eventually solved with a squirt of Swarfega and a lollipop stick) and it was soon obvious that Sacha and Francesca got on like a house on fire. If only I’d found Steve ‘Deadly’ Davies as likeable. I recall sitting on our Yamaha R1 watching Steve go through a bizarre, tai-chi-style stretching routine, complete with muted squawks, before getting on his 600 Bandit. ‘He’s very keen on Jackie Chan,’ Sacha said, rolling her eyes.

As weird as Steve was, Paul was desperate for a spannerman and Steve talked the talk, so the problem seemed solved. However, I called by a couple of days later and things weren’t going well.

‘Cyril,’ said Paul, pink-rimmed eyes struggling to focus with sheer fatigue, ‘the bloke’s a nutter. For a start, he precedes everything he does with ridiculous martial arts moves, complete with sound effects, so everything takes forever, and this is despite constantly saying, ‘crack on’, which is something I’ve yet to see him actually do. When he does get to work he’s not bad, but the bloke’s living in a dream world. He whispered to me yesterday that he’s actually on the Island on secret army manoeuvres and might get called away at any moment. It’s patently bollocks, Cyril. I mean, this is the man who claims with all sincerity that his red hair is down to a Welsh ancestor having been raped by a fox. He hates the things with a passion.’

Things came to a head on race Thursday when Steve was caught in the paddock toilets sodomising a Basil Brush soft toy, insomuch as that's possible at all. As the police led him away in cuffs he pleaded that he was actually a copper himself (that did turn out to be true) and that he’d been ‘teaching that bastard fox a lesson’, a defence which later failed to convince the magistrates.

Rubber

2009-10-09T10:17:00.002+02:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 28 June 2007

The smell of warm rubber always brings back such powerful memories. The thrilling, acrid whiff from the snot-bobbled edge of a Dragon Supercorsa after a wild ride in Umbria’s Testa di Cazzo hills. The pungent, all-enveloping scent on entering a tyre fitter’s workshop – and look, there’s the man himself, hands glistening with rim lube. Then there are the thrashings I received from my father, wielding a 19in Avon ‘Ne’r-Breach’ inner tube (deflated, I’m sad to say, else beatings could have been quite comical). The faint smell of rubber on my mother’s lips as she kissed me goodbye before I set off for school (I’d always assumed it was from her Marigolds, though thinking back, she never used them). And the vaguely fishy pong from the air let out of a police Triumph T110’s tyres round the back of an Okell’s pub on the Isle of Man one year. Yes, tyres. Perhaps the most all-round sensorially stimulating part of a motorcycle.

I recall, back in the mid-Seventies, my then-wife Teresa (oh, you remember, the asthmatic one with a penchant for spit roasts and swearing) had a real thing for tyres. I discovered this by accident after spending an increasingly desperate afternoon in the garden trying to seat the bead on a Dunlop Gold Seal. It was a hot day and eventually I returned to the house, defeated, and flopped down on a kitchen chair like a wet rag doll. Teresa brought me over a cold tin of Double Diamond and the next thing I knew her hot-pants were hanging from the cooker hood and she was riding me like a Maico 250 over the Hawkstone Park whoops – fine with adequate damping and a fat knobbly, but I was merely a passenger holding on for dear life.

Then there was that time in Germany in 1994. A few of us were at a trade show in Berlin and one evening, after a few beers in the bar at the show, a chap called Terry Fletcher, the sales manager for an aftermarket spares firm that must remain nameless, decided it would be great fun to steal one of those huge Michelin Man costumes from behind one of the stands. He somehow sneaked it out via the goods entrance and we met him around the back. This costume was so cumbersome that Terry had to be helped into it and once in, couldn’t get out again on his own. After ten minutes of messing about, the taxi arrived to take us into town for the evening. We’d all had a bit to drink so we jumped into the cab and sped off laughing, leaving Terry lumbering around the deserted carpark.

About five minutes later we saw sense and turned back to get him, but we couldn’t find Terry anywhere. Only one of us had a mobile phone back then, so there was no way of contacting him and eventually we gave up and went into the city, assuming he’d gone off on his own. What we didn’t realise was that as we stuffed our faces with smoked sausage washed down with weissbier, Terry was stumbling around like an obese albino freak in the thick rubber suit, vision severely restricted, and eventually tumbled down a steep grass bank at the back of the main hall, becoming wedged between the spars of a stout wooden fence. He was there for five days and was in a bit of a state when they rescued him. I’ve since seen him attack a cuddly Michelin Man toy with the ferocity of a drugged and taunted pit bull. The scars are deep.

Finally, when riding hard I always bear in mind the advice given to me by Pietro Ficabagnata, chief tester at Pirelli in the late Eighties. ‘Cyril,’ he told me, ‘the tyre is a fickle mistress, with a full, rounded body and a powerful grip. Treat her with respect and she will bring you untold joy, but ignore her warnings and she will tear off your manhood and throw it over the hedge of uncertainty for the wild boar of skidding to feast upon.’ Wise words indeed.

Genius? Or insanity?

2009-09-25T12:45:00.009+02:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 3 May 2007

We are constantly surrounded by – and sometimes perched upon – stunning examples of modern engineering. But the people behind these creations are often anonymous. Well, I have to say that’s probably a good thing. I'm not saying that all engineers are strange, merely that their ranks appear to harbour a large proportion of what most people would call eccentrics.

Takatoshi Takahashi was one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met, little known outside the industry in Japan, but seen as a demi-god by those within it. In mid 1996 he was given special access to a prototype of what would become the Yamaha YZF-R1, then known only by the codename of “Warm Turbot” (I believe it was meant to be “Hot Tuna”, but something was lost in translation). The idea was that he’d tune it to run in the following year’s Suzuka 8-Hour, campaigned beneath anonymous bodywork, then feed back his findings to Yamaha HQ. Well, that was the plan, and I’m afraid I feel partly responsible for what followed.

In summer 1997, I went to Japan from Yamaha UK to see Takatoshi while he prepared the bike at his clinical workshop in an industrial suburb of Iwata on the central eastern coast. Over the years, I’ve dabbled with various workshop machinery, rarely happier than when getting to grips with a mighty tool, and thanks in part to his excellent English, Takatoshi and I got on well. I was flattered when, a month before the race, he asked if I’d polish a set of conrods. I set to with the powerful bench polisher and all was going fine until there was an almighty clang and the conrod pinged out of my hands, across the workshop and struck Takatoshi squarely on the back of the head. He fell like a sack of water chestnuts.

The hospital released him later that day, claiming no lasting ill effects. However, he was a changed man. He no longer wanted me in his workshop (understandable), but neither did he want anyone else there, becoming ever more reclusive over the following weeks. Yamaha executives were rather taken aback by the armed stand-off with which they were greeted and no one predicted Takatoshi’s dramatic exit, aboard the now chopped “Warm Turbot”, the rider dressed in colourful ceremonial robes.

The bike was never seen again, but later that year a scientific expedition to the Ogasawara islands, south east of the mainland, stumbled upon an isolated encampment. There they found a small group of people involved in some sort of primitive cult, and though the hurriedly-taken photos are a little blurry, its leader is unmistakably Takatoshi Takahashi. More worrying was the object of the group’s fervent worship, a freakish, four-legged creature made of motorcycle components and animal hides. Worst of all, its monstrous head, fashioned from hunks and flaps of dried meat, bore a spine-chilling resemblance to yours truly. I had become a deity.

Another slightly unhinged engineer was Harry Teischman, who worked with me at BSA in the early Sixties, where he’d spend board meetings harvesting earwax and the nasal equivalent. We've all picked our nose or delved into our ears, but Harry could produce a prodigious haul. He would carefully roll his booty into balls before flattening them into discs. Then, as I watched from the other side of the table, he’d use his fingernail to work away at each disc in turn, but I could never see what he was doing.

One afternoon, the fire alarm sounded and after some grumbling we hurried from the room (since the time Edward Turner set fire to his trousers while doing the splits over a scented candle – it was some sort of a bet with Bert Hopwood – we'd taken fire alarms seriously). I was last out and, passing Harry's place, took my chance for a closer look. There were four discs in all, alternately of earwax and snot, and each displayed the initials of one of the people present at the meeting. The third disc (earwax) bore the initials CG. Voodoo? I would never have thought it except that a few weeks later Harry was found dead in his Solihull garden, slumped over a BSA Starfire wearing nothing but a goose-feather head-dress, his scrawny, pallid body daubed with strange runes rendered in green Hermetite. This upsetting scene was within a pentangle marked out on the lawn in empty two-pint Castrol tins. I mean, how shocking – a fragile 250cc single, of all things! It’s assumed he died of a heart attack attempting to start the heap of junk.

It came out of the sky

2009-09-11T09:10:00.003+02:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 2 April 2007

Reading Ben Miller’s recent comparison of the Honda CBR600RR and Kawasaki ZX-6R reminded me of the superb ZX-7R I had back in 1996. Actually, it was Ben’s talk of the ZX-6’s seamless fuel injection that really reminded me, because although I’ve always been a fan of carburettors, the ZX-7 was not the bike to be riding through the winter, because carb icing could turn it from a focused stallion into an unpredictable pig. And while there’s never a good time to be straddling any sort of a pig (those with a fruity palate might disagree), when there’s snow and ice on the ground it can be a nightmare, albeit one with a decidedly porcine flavour.

I recall riding up to see a friend who lived between Kendal and Penrith in the Lake District. It was mid-March and a period of mild weather had fooled me into thinking winter was all but over. How naïve of me. In my defence, perhaps I wasn’t seeing things too clearly at the time. I’d recently been divorced from Anoushka and it had been a stressful experience. Many things came out in court that were rather shaming – the fighting, the drinking and the awful temper leading to violence at home – but I could no longer put up with her behaviour and it was a relief to be free of the monster. So, not-so-young, free and single I fired up the ZX-7 and headed north with a small rucksack, a credit card and a walletful of folding stuff, aiming to have a blast of a weekend with my old mate Bob McDrew.

All was going well until I decided to leave the A684 and take some more nadgery roads in the Yorkshire Dales. I didn’t know the area, but I still had a few hours of daylight and the bike was running beautifully as we carved through the scenery. Once off the A-roads, there’s nothing like dry stone walls for sharpening the mind and on quiet roads the bike and I slotted into a groove. I could feel the tension of the previous months melting away and my spirits soared as the roads climbed higher.

When the temperature drop came, it was quite sudden, as was the appearance of a threatening blanket of low, grey cloud. I remember the bike started playing up soon afterwards. Throttle response went to pot, with the engine sometimes picking up immediately, other times not until after a huge lag, and even then the power was intermittent. My steed had turned into a rocking horse. I pressed on in the descending gloom and before long was wiping slow from my visor every few seconds. Now, I know I was old enough to know better, but surely we’ve all done it. Although I knew I ought to slow down, I was also anxious to get back to the main road, so I pressed on, the bike now lurching and coughing like a three-legged asthmatic camel (what do you mean you've never ridden one?).

The highside should have been no surprise, and I suppose to me it wasn’t. However, to a certain occupant of the roadside field I suspect it came as rather a shock. I was pitched into the air and over a low wall, landing heavily still in a riding crouch. There are two noises I shall never forget. One is that of my beloved ZX-7R revving its tits off somewhere out on the road (carb icing now not seeming to be a problem), the other is the bizarre honk of a rotund Swaledale ewe being squashed by a man descending from a snowy sky dressed in full leathers. Its life was not given in vain.

As night descended, I had a five-mile trudge before I saw the welcoming lights of a remote pub. After a hot bath, an enormous shepherd’s pie (seemed a little disrespectful in the circumstances, but it was delicious) and several pints, I was highsiding 30mph faster and flying 30 yards further. I’m not sure that the barmaid believed a word, a beautiful young Italian called Francesca, in England to improve her English and who owned a classic Husqvarna scrambler. Did I offer to school her in my native tongue? That’s another story.

Extremely good vibrations

2009-08-28T09:05:00.008+02:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 15 March 2007

I'm often asked, 'Cyril, why are your recollections so full of smut and filth?' I can only hold my hands up and say, Mother, I've lived a charmed life full of good fortune.

The other day, Francesca and I were poring over the January issue of Bike and the luscious photos of the new Ducati 1098. We agreed that certain motorcycles really do have a certain sex appeal in themselves, and I can assure you it goes beyond the merely academic discussion of bulges, tubes and orifices.

Many years ago I had a Suzuki GSX-R750H, hard to believe now, but there was a time I could bend this old frame of mine to fit a supersports bike. And talking of bending my frame, this was when I was married to former Soviet discus champ Anoushka (she of neck-twisting thighs and killer right hook fame). She always loved the bikes and would climb on the back at any opportunity (she'd climb on my back at any opportunity, but that's another, rather painful, story). The woman was a real speed freak and always urged me to go faster, whatever bike it was we were riding. But when it came to the Gixer, it was different. We'd get up to about 80 and she'd start nudging me in the kidneys to slow down. This would generally happen on long stretches of boring road, such as a motorway.

It wasn't until we tried an intercom that I realised what was going on. It turned out that in top gear at 80mph the 750 would produce a particular frequency of vibration through the subframe. I'd never really noticed this, but Anoushka certainly had, as betrayed by barely stifled whimpering and laboured breathing one day on the M6 between Kendal and Moffat (normal enough after a service station lunch, but we hadn’t stopped). And there was me thinking it was the fresh air leaving her rosy-cheeked at the end of a good ride. The intercom didn't last long, by the way. Ever had 110 decibels of Russian profanities piped directly into your ear while trying to find an obscure address in an unfamiliar city?

Another experience I had happened when much younger. I must only have been about 18 years old and riding around on a tatty AJS single. Well, you chaps will know what it's like when a healthy teenage body is flooded with out-of-control hormones; a nanny goat in a summer dress could have given me a stiffy, but the vibes created by the old Ayjay would cause trouser anarchy.

I recall having to run a package round to a local engineering firm, the aptly named Upright and Sons. It was a mild day and I had on a woollen jumper, with no jacket, and loose-fitting worsted trousers. Traffic was heavy and I had to make several detours before I reached the Upright offices, by which time I could have honed a Panther cylinder with my own special tool. The cruel trick was that after ten minutes or so of these vibes the old todger would be left practically numb and I'd become pretty much unaware of it.

Have you ever seen a woman faint? I entered reception with the package in my hands and as I walked across to the desk I saw a look of absolute horror on the aged receptionist's face. Her gaze was fixed firmly on my groin and by the time I'd realised my predicament it was too late, up she stood and down she went. This was, let's remember, 1953, a more reserved age. I'm sure if an 18-year-old arrived in such a state these days the receptionist might well go down, but in an altogether different way.

I was terribly sad when I sold that bike, rattly and slow as it was, but the old boy who bought it was thrilled. He never let it out of his sight and even when he became too old to ride he could be seen sitting on the Ayjay on his drive, revving the thing rhythmically, a wistful smile on his dreamy face.

Thunderballs

2009-08-14T09:20:00.006+02:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 2 February 2007

It was 1964 and I was a young and, whenever possible, thrusting Global Sales Director at Triumph, but as Triumph was by then controlled by the mighty BSA I was generally aware of what went on at the Small Heath HQ. Back then, the Cold War was at its height, as were James Bond films, with Goldfinger on the screens that year (I saw it in a Soho cinema and was expecting something entirely different). There was another film already in production – Thunderball – and BSA was approached by special effects genius John Stears (who later won an Oscar for his work). He wanted to equip a performance motorcycle with rocket launchers, to be ridden by the SPECTRE agent Fiona Volpe (played by the really rather stunning Luciana Paluzzi, who happens to be Francesca’s aunt’s godmother’s niece, but I digress).

All went very well and Stears got a 650 Lightning on which his own people did a lot of modification work. Months later, there was a special private preview of the film at the Birmingham Odeon to which various members of the BSA board were invited, including Harold Armstrong and Edgar Smeer.

Armstrong and Smeer were long-serving board members with solid engineering backgrounds, which makes what follows all the more baffling. They were, as a pair, so taken by the stunts they saw in the film, featuring a pneumatic woman in tight black leather shooting rockets from her Beeza, that they took it upon themselves to develop their own fully-functional version of the bike, no special effects needed. They rightly assumed that they’d never get official approval for the work but convinced themselves that the Ministry of Defence would be thrilled with the machine once presented with it. At the subsequent trial at the Old Bailey they referred to the disastrous events as ‘snags’. The judge, I recall, preferred the term ‘criminal negligence’.

Thanks to BSA’s background as a gun manufacturer, Harry Armstrong had several useful contacts in the arms trade, which was how he managed to get hold of the anti-tank guns which were fitted to the side of an A65 Firebird street scrambler. After various bench tests and many hours with the slide rule, Armstrong and Smeer decided to take the contraption to a disused airfield for secret tests. We should be glad that they decided to film their exploits as the grainy black and white footage provides a valuable document (reputedly available in some obscure corners of the internet, though I've never found it, and even Francesca's deft young fingers fail to raise anything despite intense googling).

The footage, as shown in court that day, begins with Armstrong and Smeer unloading the bike from the back of a Commer van on a bleak and blowy airfield (I forget where). The bike looks proficient enough, with the launchers attached to its flanks. But then, from the back of the van, emerges the bizarre sight of Smeer's secretary, Janet Jones, dressed in a replica of the leather catsuit worn by Fiona Volpe in Thunderball. All very well on a toned Italian siren, not so fetching on a middle-aged mother of three a little too fond of the biscuit barrel. The impression was of an over-stuffed black pudding at bursting point. The men had clearly convinced her to take on this role purely for their own pleasure as her riding skills were not the best, as soon became clear. In fact, one wonders whether the whole venture wasn't focused solely on getting Janet Jones into a leather catsuit, an endeavour that I imagine required a couple of hefty lads and a pint of baby oil.

Anyway, the A65 was fired up and, with Armstrong filming furiously, Janet Jones squeaked onto the saddle with the sound of a hand being dragged over a highly-inflated balloon. The following events happened very quickly indeed and I recall the court re-watched the footage in slow motion many times. It seems Janet released the clutch rather abruptly, the back wheel stepped out, the bike went down on one side and one rocket shot out and destroyed the Commer, seen exploding in the background. Janet, now sprawling on the tarmac, is highly compromised as the catsuit's gusset seam finally gives up and bursts wide open (ah, now I remember, it was Blackbushe airfield in Hampshire) and Smeer flings himself on top of her in what he claimed to be an attempt to 'preserve her modesty', though I've never before heard it called a 'modesty'. It's clear in the footage that she sees things differently and the ensuing fight goes on for almost a minute, the dedicated Armstrong not missing one second with the camera.

It's a shame that the film ran out before the arrival of the police soon after. What they found was a scene of devastation, degradation, broken machinery and a grown man crying – a scene that by the decade's end would be fairly normal at the increasingly troubled BSA.

Lord of the Flywheels

2009-08-01T00:19:00.010+02:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 22 January 2007

What first set me off on this passion for motorcycles? I can still remember the day that started a lifetime's obsession.

It was summer 1945 and my brother and I were at Uncle Gilbert’s place near Uttoxeter. I was ten years old and distinctly recall emerging from the improvised swimming pool my uncle had made using hay bales and a tarpaulin. He was on the gravel path on a large motorcycle, watching us intently with a far away look in his eyes. I ran over and he picked me up in his strong arms and lowered me gently onto his big thumper. It was such a rich sensory experience, the smell of warm lubricant, the feel of ribbed rubber in my hand as I reached out and gripped tightly, and when he loomed up behind me and thrust hard with an animal-like grunt, the thing came to life between my legs with a pulsing throb and I was left breathless by the whole amazing experience. At that point something happened deep inside me. Yes, Uncle Gilbert had planted a seed. Five years later I was a messenger boy at Ariel and the rest, as they say, is sub judice.

Many years later still, in 1976, I was UK Sales Manager for Honda. It was my first time working for the Japanese after years with the British industry, and I was keen to make an impression. It was that memorably scorching summer and in those pre-Playstation days the streets and parks were filled with youngsters. One day, I stopped at the edge of a park in Chiswick to double check something on a new Gold Wing I’d taken for a spin from the Power Road HQ. Within seconds the bike was surrounded by chattering, goggle-eyed kids keen to know everything about it. That got me thinking; why not set up a special day for youngsters to introduce them to the wonders of motorcycles? Some might immediately take up off-road sports, others might start saving for their first road bike. It couldn’t fail. Or so I thought. I’d decided to keep a diary of events that day, to enable me to pinpoint the most successful areas for replication nationwide. What follows are extracts from that notebook.

09:30 Saturday 21 August, St John’s Park, Chiswick
Hot and sunny. Bikes all here and on display, including CB125S, CB750F1, CJ360T (though God knows why), CB400 Four, XL250 and GL1000 Gold Wing. People beginning to drift in. No sign of Bill Curtis [my Dealer Liaison Manager]. All bikes to remain strictly stationary with engines off!

10:40 Place filling up nicely and the kids love the XL and the Gold Wing in particular. Some rather fetching young mums around, too! Apparently Bill is organising a refreshments truck and will be along shortly. Small fat boy has just fallen off the stationary CJ360 and torn his shorts. Will have to placate irate father.

10:55 I take two aspirins for the pain in my cheek and although I cannot currently see out of my left eye I’m assured that the swelling should quickly subside. He really was rather angry. Bill Curtis has arrived, ushering in a large snacks wagon that appears to sell alcohol. Maybe not the best thing at this event, but still, I might have a quick snifter to help with the pain.

12:15 Marion is absolutely stunning, although her 15-year-old son, Wayne, is a little shit. Pain is easing nicely thanks to Mr J Walker. After much badgering, decide that starting the engines is fine. But definitely NO riding!

14:40 Luckily, it was the XL that was ridden into the ornamental fish pond and it showed its off-road ability to the full. Unfortunately, Wayne, flapping from the bars like a rag doll, found it all rather a shock. Perhaps I shouldn't have leaped from the pillion, but it seemed a hopeless and extremely dangerous situation. Bugger that!

16:20 Bill has totalled the Wing. I don’t know how it happened. Susan (or Sally?) and I were ensconced in the herbaceous border discussing the effect of crankshaft off-set on piston skirt friction levels. I emerged to see the bike on fire in the middle of the bandstand. The CB125 and XL250 are now wailing skeletons ridden by youths stripped to the waist, their bodies painted with ash from various fires. I appear to have created Lord of the Flies on wheels. What fun. Another drink, I feel.

23.15 Released on bail pending appearance at Acton magistrates court. I seem to have lost my trousers. Not the best of days. Whole thing needs a bit of a rethink.

The TriBSA bonk plot

2009-07-17T08:49:00.004+02:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 14 December 2006

‘Get me Ago’s sperm!’ And with that shout from the boardroom so began one of the strangest and most regrettable chapters in the history of the British motorcycle industry.

This year I’ve spent many a happy hour glued to the screen watching lithe youngsters perform while a foaming stubby sits snugly in my hand. MotoGP has been thrilling, but how much more thrilling it would be for us Brits if we had a bunch of riders out there capable of getting on the podium. No disrespect to James Elison, [now James Toseland – Ed] who at least gives us a presence.

In the late Sixties we Brits were beginning to struggle both on the track and in the showrooms. When Mike Hailwood retired at the end of the 1967 season, it left only Phil Read with a real chance of winning a prestige title (which he did admirably, with a 125, two 250 and two 500 crowns between 1968-’74). But it was clear to all that the glory days were coming to an end and something had to be done. There was much talk of racing academies and the like, but nothing has even been divulged of the plot to systematically breed fresh racing stock. It was a dark period in Britain’s proud motorcycling history.

By 1968 the boardroom at BSA-Triumph was being infiltrated by accountants and marketing men with little background in motorcycling. The future looked grim for this once immensely successful industry and they were desperate for a solution. In November of that year, three directors – Tom Wildman, Terry Sheldon and William Atkins – gathered for an informal meeting at the Talbot Inn, Leamington Spa. The discussion that took place over pies and pints today beggars belief. It was agreed that what dealers needed was not only a high-tech product to combat the increasingly popular and sophisticated Japanese motorcycles, but also a highly-talented British racer to put the firm’s name on the podium (imagine how Ducati feel right now, with Capirossi [now Casey Stoner – Ed] doing the business for them). However, BSA-Triumph's methods were questionable to say the least.

It’s said that Atkins first proposed obtaining Phil Read’s sperm with a view to creating a test tube racer, as it were, even offering up his own wife, Glynis, as the carrier. However, although in vitro fertilization was in development, the first success wouldn’t come for another ten years and it was decided that given Triumph’s inability to get a reliable oil feed to rocker spindles, the chances of manipulating Read’s lively semen into the right nook or cranny were minimal.

It was then Sheldon who suggested that surely the thing to do would be to select a young, healthy woman, fully paid for the task, to seduce a racer and fall pregnant, the progeny to then be raised in an environment that would nurture his inbred racing talent. And why not, he suggested, aim for the top? Giacomo Agostini had already won four world titles and showed no signs of slowing.

So, the buxom daughter of a former British racer of some repute (doubling their chances of producing a racer-baby, so they argued) was enrolled for the job and packed off to Italy with the aim of draining Ago dry. The firm lost contact with her after two weeks and after a couple of months had given up hope of ever seeing her again, assuming she’d simply done a runner with the down payment of 400 guineas. But five months later she returned, clearly pregnant. Champagne corks popped in the boardroom.

However, doubt was soon cast over the child’s parentage. Rumour had it that the midwife sprang back in shock when the glistening infant slipped out and emitted an unearthly, guttural howl. He had more of a pelt than skin and by the age of five his Cro-Magnon features and inability to master simple words were giving serious cause for concern. Unfortunately, he was never able to cope with riding even a tricycle, a nasty tumble mercifully knocking out one of the buck teeth from his hideously overcrowded gums and leaving his ginger mop with a slight bald patch. A child of Ago's? Never. He was, however, extremely dexterous and when presented, aged 7, with an 80cc Italjet scrambler he rapidly converted it into a rudimentary two-speed ploughing device.

Aged 11 he escaped into the wild and, now in his thirties, is believed to be living a feral existence in the dense forests of Cannock Chase in Staffordshire. Rumours that he’s being stalked by Foggy Petronas trappers, keen to offer him a development engineer position, are completely unsubstantiated.

Testing times

2009-07-03T09:15:00.006+02:00

From Cyril's memoires dated 7 November 2006

The Kawasaki ZZR1400, Suzuki Hayabusa, even the ageing and relatively sane Honda Blackbird, we’d all have given a testicle to medical science to have just one day on any one of those bikes back in the spring of 1960. Why? The first stage of the M1 motorway had been opened in December 1959, a 50-odd mile stretch from Watford, Hertfordshire to Crick in Northamptonshire (now junctions five to 18). Mostly three lanes, almost empty of traffic and absolutely no speed limit whatsoever (they didn’t spoil the fun until 1965).

At that time I was Overseas Sales Manager at BSA and for a short while, with the new M1 just a 30-mile hack away from the HQ in Brum, unofficial high-speed testing was frequent and exhaustive. It might have heralded a golden era of test riding at Small Heath, but I’m afraid the whole subject of testing on the M1 came to be seen as something of a curse.

Test riding bikes on the M1 was officially frowned upon by BSA, but despite this, testers would often hammer up and down at full tilt enjoying the relative space and the chance to hold the bike on the stop for sustained periods. Sometimes they’d be spotted by management lackeys and reported, other times news of an unfortunate incident would unavoidably reach HQ. There was the time that Harry Charlton rammed an old Golden Flash test mule beneath a lorry carrying effluent to a sewage works, rupturing the tanker and causing a lethally slippery and nauseatingly pungent slick to spread across the whole carriageway. From then on the bike was known as the Golden Flush and Harry as The Crapped Crusader.

Another incident involved veteran test rider Sid Turnbull, who’d stopped by at a friend’s abattoir near St Albans to collect five gallons of pigs’ offal to feed to his five Red Setters. The offal, in a thick, flexible, black rubber tub, was precariously strapped to the back of an A7 Shooting Star. Just outside Potters Crouch, with about 80mph on the vibrating clock, the bag slipped round, jammed the back wheel solid and the bike went down. Sid ended up in a field, where he lay unconscious for about 20 minutes, meanwhile, the Potters Crouch police, unused as they were to dealing with high-speed traffic accidents, decided that the splat of bloody guts they found on their arrival was the inevitable result of having a speed limit-free motorway. This, they muttered among themselves, was the carnage of which they had warned.

So management got tough and when the next rider was caught on the M1, a youngster by the name of Johnny ‘Fireball’ Jameson (that’s another story), he was summoned by none other than the Chief Executive, the eccentric genius Edward Turner.

Turner was a daunting man. Though nearing retirement he still cut a powerful figure but had always been known for a certain maverick approach. It was around this time that he was putting a lot of effort into designing a scooter to rival the successful Italian models and I suspect the pressure was leading to increasingly erratic behaviour. (Incidentally, left alone in his office one morning, I couldn’t help noticing some scribblings on his desk jotter, possible names for the new scooter. Marilyn, Lana, Betty. No, no. Edna, Ethel. THINK MAN!! Maud, Mary. BOLLOCKS! BOLLOCKS! BOLLOCKS! They eventually settled on ‘Tina’, so to speak.)

Well, young Johnny went into the great man’s office and the door was closed. We’ll never know exactly how the conversation went, but the next thing anyone knew, Johnny emerged with Turner on his back, riding him piggy-back. Johnny was straining to maintain balance and momentum as Turner, a portly man stripped to his vest and pants and sweating profusely, whipped his mount with a clutch cable, shouting, ‘This is how to bloody test ride, you sodding young upstart! I’ll ride you to hell and back, you jive monkey!’

When Johnny finally collapsed just outside the toolmakers’ workshop after an agonising ten-minute gallop, Turner simply strolled back to his office as if nothing had happened and the incident was never spoken of within earshot of management. From that day BSA testers were very cautious about using the M1 for work, lest they too should be subjected to what became known as ‘the Teddy-back ride’.

Heat

2009-06-19T01:12:00.004+02:00

From Cyril's memoires dated 2 October 2006

Heat. Without it our bikes would go nowhere, but dealing with it can be a problem. My lovely young wife Francesca reminded me of this on a recent trip to the south of Italy on my Ducati Multistrada. Underseat exhausts are a tidy design, but, she explained, squatting over a hot pipe for a few hours can lead to a certain amount of discomfort, especially in an Italian summer. By the time we reached our hotel, Francesca was desperate to jump in the shower and douse the bush fire, as it were. Being a gentleman, I insisted on applying a slathering of cold-cream. It was the very least I could do.

The temperature in a combustion chamber can reach more than 1000 deg C, so there's a hell of a lot of heat to get rid of. Liquid cooling helps, but I recall a trip to South Africa in 1982 when we were involved in pre-launch tests of the superb, air-cooled Suzuki GS1100GK. The simple aim was to put in plenty of miles on three bikes in high temperatures and our small team comprised myself, chief engineer Colin Craywell and one of his young protégés, Ashley Gardener. Much could have been learned from that trip, if only things had gone according to plan.

Ashley Gardener was a tall, skinny, wax-white youth in the Peter Crouch mould, very uncomfortable in the hot South African summer and if something wasn't chaffing then something else had broken out in a rash or had swollen painfully. We were all in the hotel swimming pool one evening and I'd never seen so many mosquito bites on a man. He assured us they were 'all over' and had to be dissuaded from proving the point in a sheltered area behind the chlorination out-house.

Day five's itinerary demanded that we take a long and extremely exposed route from Britstown to Moffie. The bikes were checked the night before and we set off well loaded with water and food. The morning went very well and Colin and I were loving the ride, dicing with one another, or just sitting back and enjoying that silky motor and the stunning scenery. Ashley loitered at the back like a sullen teenager and at each stop reeled off a list of blisters, sores and throbs.

The road deteriorated badly and we were reduced to 20mph for more that 30 miles. Well, you can imagine that on a fully-faired air-cooled bike in 40 deg C, the heat rising up from the engine was enough to boil an egg. My eggs were certainly boiled. After a while we realised that Ashley was no longer with us. Colin offered to go back to see what had happened, while I stayed beneath a shady poes tree.

After half an hour I started to get worried. After an hour I jumped on the GS and retraced our tracks. A mile back, I found both Ashley and Colin and the vision I was presented with in that sun-scorched landscape is one I've never shaken from my mind. Colin's bike was on its centre-stand and the throttle was pinned open, the rear wheel spinning furiously. He was lashed to the bike on his back with his head on the clocks and his legs splayed over the panniers. He was absolutely naked and gagged with what I assumed to be his own underpants. I could see no sign of Ashley.

Then, from behind me came a blood-curdling scream and I turned in time to see a spark plug spanner fly past my left ear. Ashley was naked, too, except for a bandanna fashioned from an inner tube. His scrawny, almost hairless body was smeared with engine oil, presumably taken from his own machine, which now lay on its side in the poephol bushes. He squawked like a bird and with uncanny agility scaled a nearby tree, from where he proceeded to put on a lewd display of genital gymnastics while grunting, babbling and drooling. It was hard to tell whether he was in a state of arousal or if his distended manhood was the result of yet another nasty bite, but distended it was. Meanwhile, the bike was still revving painfully in the background and Colin began to yelp in pain as Ashley pelted his rotund, naked form with spiky fruit from the tree. It was a scene straight from hell.

Back in Britain, the doctors blamed heat stroke for Ashley's bizarre interlude and a week later he returned to work. However, Colin Craywell never recovered fully from the trauma and he spent the rest of his working life in a Jawa-CZ dealership just outside Chorlton-cum-Hardy. It seems that for Colin the nightmare was never-ending.

Auto erotica

2009-06-06T19:15:00.004+02:00

From Cyril's memoires dated 22 September 2006

Twist 'n' go motorcycles, highlighted recently by Honda’s DN-01 and Yamaha’s FJR1300AS, prompt much debate. Emasculated beasts for those who don't have the skill to swap ratios? Or a natural development letting the rider concentrate on other aspects of machine control? My own opinion is darkened by a rather unpleasant experience.

Few will remember HappyTime, a Dutch set-up moderately successful with 50cc scooters in the late Eighties. But in 1981 their ambitions had been higher. At the time I was European sales manager for Suzuki but a friend of mine told me that HappyTime, who were as yet unknown to me, could offer lucrative freelance work. Truth be told, I needed the extra cash due to my then wife Anoushka’s heavy addiction to vodka, horse meat, gambling and shopping, usually in that disastrous order, so I agreed to get involved. If only I’d known.

I met Arty Boerelul, HappyTime's owner, at the firm's base on an industrial estate to the south of Amsterdam in the spring of 1981. Something about him immediately put me on my guard. The lace-up leather trousers, zapata moustache and bubble perm were fine. No, it was a fevered look in the eyes that made me uneasy.

'For shure, Shyril, I'm not bringing you here to be shafting you, you know? I’m wanting everything to be shtraight up!' I'm sure he didn't intend the double entendres.

'I'm having a great thing to be showing you - a monster that will shurely impresh! I'm hoping you'll be taking it in your hands!'

This, Arty explained, was the future. A motorcycle with automatic gearbox but also, unlike Moto Guzzi's Convert and Honda's CB750A (recent experiments back then), he told me it had plenty of power as at its heart was a turbo-charged Kawasaki Z1-R engine. But it was also a hideous carbuncle, a massive torque converter contributing to its pot-belly girth.

'I'm calling it the Freefist Slippy,' said Arty proudly. Given that I was employed in a marketing capacity, I convinced him to think again.

I managed to avoid riding the contraption for quite a while, until one fateful day when Arty said, ‘Shyril, we've been working for sheveral months and you've not yet ridden the beasht. For shure, you're needing thish for the true knowledge.'

For shure, I hadn't been looking forward to this moment. The only time I'd seen the machine in action had been in the hands of Arty, who would manfully wrestle it out of the carpark, vicious power surges and coarse and thudding ratio shifts causing his bubble-permed head to rock violently back and forth like a hairy bladder on a stick. However, the money was good and if I wanted to keep the work I needed to show willing.

The first 100 yards were fine. Yes, the change into second severely cricked my neck (I heard a definite twang) and when I throttled off slightly the instant lurch threw the borrowed and ill-fitting open-face helmet over my eyes. At this point I'd still not collided with anything, so it was going relatively well. But as I pushed the helmet off my eyes I thudded into a pothole, the jolt causing me to open the throttle no more than half an inch, but the result was disastrous.

With a sickening lurch the turbo kicked in, whipping my head back on my cricked neck, which locked solid with a blinding white flash of pain. I let go of the machine (by now, incidentally, called the Freebase Wristy) and tumbled off, bouncing into the road. I lay there helpless and watched its progress.

The chances of the riderless bike ploughing into a delegation from the Lesbian Society of Rotterdam, down to assess production of a new range of strap-on 'accessories', must have been a million to one. Luckily, there were no serious injuries, but quite a few nasty gashes.

Arty Boerelul and I parted company at that point and I never again heard of him or his Freebase Wristy. And I have to say that since that day I've had an aversion to anything that's automatic, straps on or is a diabolic combination of the two.

Absolute rotters

2009-05-22T09:36:00.006+02:00

From Cyril's memoires dated 20 August 2006

When the MotoGP circus cavorted into Britain recently, it made me think not so much of the great victories, the thrilling skills, the memorable races, but rather of the downright skulduggery that has gone on down the years. Some rivalries reached such a pitch as to drive even level-headed riders to acts of near lunacy.

The spats between Phil Read and Bill Ivy in the Sixties were legendary and while Read’s manoeuvres on Ivy have been well documented, he’s been a tower of discretion in not revealing some of the provocation coming from ‘Little Bill’.

During the 1968 season the Yamaha team mates both had a chance of winning the 250 world championship. Things had been especially fraught during practice for the Dutch TT at Assen. The evening before the race, while Read was back at the hotel completing his life-size bust of Queen Elizabeth II made out of plum stones glued together with Bostik (a grotesque thing that he shows to visitors to this day) Bill nipped into town on a borrowed bicycle and returned with a packet of itching powder, which he emptied into his team-mate’s leathers hanging in the pit garage.

Race day came and although Read was leading comfortably he was clearly in some distress and began to lose ground. On lap 12 he pulled over and threw off his leathers and rode the rest of the race pretty much naked. He made up many places but narrowly lost to Ivy by a tenth of a second. With the Summer of Love fresh in the memory no one batted an eyelid at the time, in fact much of the Dutch crowd had consumed copious amounts of LSD, with many copulating openly in the grandstand. However, footage of the race was subsequently doctored using the latest Hollywood techniques to make Read appear fully clothed throughout.

Barry Sheene was always one for the ladies and it was with this in mind that his old rival Johnny Cecotto decided to attempt to put Sheene out of the 1977 Finnish Grand Prix. Cecotto aimed to ensure that Sheene was simply too tired to race to his full potential and through a series of messages sent via mechanics and local gofers arranged for a beautiful and indefatigable prostitute to be sent to Sheene’s room the night before the race.

However, there was a dreadful muddle and instead of a high-performance tart, Sheene took delivery of a nanny goat. Never one to be overawed and a keen practical joker himself, he set about milking the goat and by morning had produced several small cheeses and bowl of yoghurt, which he presented to a crestfallen Cecotto at breakfast. But Cecotto had the last laugh as Sheene, ever the perfectionist, had laboured feverishly on the dairy products throughout the night, at one point sending out for a second goat as the first batch of cheeses were not up to scratch but the original nanny had been squeezed dry. Our Bazza was too exhausted to put in his best performance on the track, finishing an uncharacteristic sixth while Cecotto took the win.

One of the great rivalries of recent times has been between Valentino Rossi and Max Biaggi. The most memorable manifestation of this was the infamous ‘fight’ between the two after the 2001 Catalunya Grand Prix. Much was made of it at the time but few real facts emerged. However, living in Italy I’ve made a few contacts in the racing fraternity and it appears the truth was stranger than any imagined scenario.

Italy is a country engulfed by superstitions dating back hundreds of years and that still hold sway, especially in rural parts of the peninsula. It seems Rossi and Biaggi had been involved in Il Passaggio della Cacca (The Passing of the Turd), a complex and ancient form of hexing with, to the outsider, an impenetrable set of rules. Basically, the hexer must touch the victim with a bony part of the body to pass on ‘the turd’, but the subsequent re-passing must be done with a body part appropriate to the strict rules of conduct. It seems that in the days prior to the race Biaggi had ‘toed’ Rossi and Rossi had ‘kneed’ Biaggi some time later. This went on even during the race where if one watches closely there’s a clear clash of elbows on lap seven, a complex manoeuvre that left Rossi with ‘the turd’. However, Rossi’s decisive use of the knuckles immediately after the race turded Biaggi once and for all, a crucial moment that even today seems to be dogging the Roman’s MotoGP career.

Kwaka-Gamma-Cow-Pow

2009-05-08T16:54:00.007+02:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 8 July 2006

Smiffy is a character from my past with whom I’ve had many adventures, several of which I’ve tried hard to forget, though they return in fevered dreams. I shall now tell you of one I’ve kept to myself for many years.

Carl Smith is one of the finest motorcycle mechanics I’ve ever met. Known to his mates as Smiffy or Smudger, we’ve been firm friends since school. He was a bull of a youngster, a superb lose-head prop and bore huge forearms which easily powered him to the position of school’s top arm-wrestler. And even at that relatively young age he already packed a fearsomely destructive punch.

In 1985 we both celebrated our 50^th birthdays and decided to mark the occasion with a motorcycle tour of Britain. I was working for Suzuki and got my hands on the then new RG500 Gamma – not ideal for touring, but hilarious two-stroke madness. Smiffy had his Kawasaki Z1000-engined Harris Magnum, a beast he’d spend years tuning to match his rather volatile but ever entertaining personality.

On a bright summer’s morning we headed for Dorset, for no other reason than as kids we’d had a great holiday together in Weymouth. Early on there were tedious dual carriageways to clear and what better way to clear them than quickly? It was still early morning and the long stretches of open tarmac were too much to resist so Smiffy and I lined our bikes up side by side and wound up the throttle.

I was caught napping with the Suzuki out of its power band and the Magnum pulled away in top gear on torque. Down a gear and the Gamma’s revs pushed to the magical 9000, the exhaust note crisped and Smiffy was reeled in. As I crouched behind the fairing I turned to see him braced hard against the wind blast. I flashed a victorious grin and screamed off with 148 on the clock. I didn’t know it then, but I’d sown the seeds of disaster. Smiffy has never taken defeat well. (As kids, we once battled to capture the most disgusting fart in a jam jar. After several attempts my gaseous resources were exhausted but I’d produced the most nasally damaging parp. Smiffy, straining desperately to produce one final example, went a little too far with dire consequences.) Laying the Magnum to waste had lit Smiffy’s fuse and he would have revenge.

We left the dual carriageway for a twisting B-road and the Magnum filled my mirrors. We came to a short straight which, at most, was good for 100mph before a sharp bend. Half way along the Magnum came by doing about 130. By the time I was braking hard Smiffy was bursting through a flimsy gate into a field, feet down and elbows raised like a motocrosser.

Somehow, he stayed upright. I found him sitting on the edge of a trough lighting a cigarette. The Magnum was his pride and joy and the thought of it being totalled in a crash had shaken him up. I approached with caution as at times of high excitement (and damaged pride) Smiffy could be unpredictable, but he smiled ruefully and we laughed about it.

As we chatted, a fat Friesian cow wandered over to drink from the trough. When it had finished, it lifted its tail and a steaming gush of piddle cascaded over the Magnum. Horrified, Smiffy leaped up and tried pushing the cow aside, but the pee kept coming and the cow wouldn’t shift. Incensed, Smiffy took a step back, threw off his jacket and let go with one of his trademark right hooks. Well, I’ve seen him lay out a few blokes in my time, but a cow? The creature’s back legs buckled, it lurched backwards, knocked the Magnum onto its side then squatted with its full weight on the bike. But the searingly hot engine against the cow’s backside caused it to jerk back up, wide-eyed and mooing, inadvertently head-butting Smiffy full in the face.

I’m afraid that was the end of our celebratory jaunt. As I said, Smiffy never could take defeat, and being knocked cold by a dairy cow was a personal disaster. To this day his explanation for the clearly broken nose involves a yarn about a gang of skinheads. And I, naturally, have never contested that in public. Until now.

The Medicated Toilet Roll of Fate

2009-04-26T11:56:00.008+02:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 17 June 2006

Electric motorcycles are in the news more and more lately. I ended my full-time career in the motorcycle industry in 2000, while working for Yamaha, a very go-getting bunch who have put some great technology into our road bikes – the EXUP power valve and Deltabox frame to name just a couple. But they missed the boat on this one.

You may recall a colleague of mine from my days at BSA, Peter Cartwright, he of shaven dog, V5 lawnmower and faecal-powered engine infamy. Yet it must never be forgotten that behind an often catastrophically confused mind lay a razor-sharp engineering intellect.

Back in 1999, I received from Peter a highly detailed proposal for an electrically-powered motorcycle, meticulously drafted in his distinctive brown ink. The fact it appeared on scores of sheets of crisp Izal medicated toilet paper stuck together with Elastoplast may have fazed someone not familiar with Peter’s eccentric methodology, but I didn’t let it muddy the issue. Unfortunately, Yamaha top brass didn’t see it in quite the same way and refused to follow up the project.

I wasn’t going to be stopped there and wanted to help the unfortunate Peter to realise what could have been his greatest achievement. I’d built up a few handy contacts in almost 50 years in the business and managed to get an independent engineering firm (whom for legal reasons cannot be named) to take on the project and decide its feasibility. Despite my warnings, they decided a face-to-face meeting with Peter would be necessary if they were to fully understand his concept, so I made arrangements with the authorities at his care home to be able to take him out for the day.

I thought it would be a treat for Peter to be collected by motorcycle (apart from having been a road rider, he was an excellent scrambler in his day, only missing out on a ride in the 1958 British Grand Prix at Hawkstone Park due to being heavily beaten the night before by a gang of teddy boys in an alley, in circumstances still shrouded in mystery), so on a bright May morning I went along on my V-Max. I’d have taken my company R1, but my neck was undergoing a recurrent bout of spasms, the result of an injury picked up many years previously during a bed-based incident while grappling with my former Soviet discus champion wife, Anoushka. (Powerful thighs, clamping action, suffocation and panic. I’m sure I need say no more.)

We’d arranged to meet in a pub close to the engineering firm’s headquarters, reasoning that it would be a more relaxed atmosphere for the rather edgy Peter. I’d booked the small conservatory, which was ideal, with plenty of light and soothing views of the well-kept gardens. Introductions were made, pints ordered and soon Peter was chatting away eagerly seeming every bit the young genius I’d worked with all those years before.

Now, I maintain to this day that it was the care home’s responsibility to tell me about Peter’s medication, particularly its perilous incompatibility with alcohol. About an hour into the meeting Peter excused himself to go to the toilet. There was nothing to warn of the performance to come.

We were alerted by screams from the public bar – those of several elderly women and of a V-four engine being held against the rev limiter. I ran through in time to see Peter, having filled the bar with acrid rubber smoke, heading straight for me, his eyes a demonic blaze and teeth bared as he hunched over the V-Max’s bars looking like a coke-fuelled stunt-riding pensioner. I stepped aside and he rode through the open double doors into the conservatory, straight through the closed French windows and into the garden, his Izal-based plans, snagged on the left handlebar, trailing in the breeze.

The police apprehended Peter several miles away. He’d ridden the V-Max into a village duck pond and when they arrived he was still sitting on it, catatonic, up to the fuel tank in muddy water. A small gathering of locals were edging slowly nearer to view the lunatic in their midst.

So, there you have it. The Izal plans were never found and Peter never again spoke of his ideas for an electrically-powered bike. Actually, he didn't speak at all for three months. It was a disaster that I firmly believe set back the development of such machines by many years, all triggered by just one pint of Ramsbottom’s Inappropriate Fondle. You live and learn.

Kevin, camping and carnage

2009-04-10T19:28:00.005+02:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 14 May 2006

Ah spring. A time of fast motorcycles, beer gardens, buxom lovelies and… camping. A roll of material strapped to the saddle offers the magical freedom of rapid travel with shelter at hand. But a tent isn’t the most secure accommodation.

A very good friend of mine, Bob Scammel, has a son, Neil, who rode his just-launched and exotic FireBlade to the 1992 Cambridge Folk Festival. The lad had more interest in poke than folk and having heard that the festival is awash with single females (a cruel fallacy in my experience) he decided to try his luck.

Having endured finger-in-the-ear caterwauling and interminable fiddling, Neil decided to seek some fiddling of his own, homing in on the prettiest drunk he could find. All went well and the girl advised Neil, also rather worse for wear, that her friend had gone off elsewhere so she’d be alone in her tent and to join her there in ten minutes. In the meantime, Neil returned to his own tent and, displaying youthful high spirits and imagination, took blue and red felt pens to his erect manhood to create a mini Pepsi-era Kevin Schwantz, presumably as a form of sexual ice breaker.

Lord knows how long this penile doodling took, but long enough for the girl to come looking for her Romeo. Unfortunately, she lurched drunkenly into the FireBlade, toppling it onto Neil’s tent as he lay there admiring his handiwork. I’m afraid Kevin Schwantz took the brunt of the impact. Apparently the ambulance men dropped Neil off the stretcher twice while leaving the field, so wracked were they with barely suppressed giggles. It was, by all accounts, an excellent likeness, if a little crooked.

A second incident features yours truly. It was summer 1986, I was working for Suzuki and had borrowed one of the all-new GSX-R1100s. Good grief, that blew the cobwebs away as my then wife Anoushka and I blasted down to Bordeaux for a week’s sunshine. Ah, I can still hear her excited screams as we tore through northern France.

We arrived late afternoon, pitched the tent on a busy site then nipped into town to sample the local vin de pays. Afternoon turned to evening and the wine flowed on. At about 9pm, in walked a couple wearing lurid Cordura bike jackets and speaking English. We got chatting, they were very friendly, and the rest of the evening flew by with plenty more plonk consumed. Fine, you say. And it was, but not for long.

Staggering back to the site we got chatting about the Bol d’Or 24-Hour and it turned out that this chap – the name of whom escapes me, despite having read it so many times in solicitors’ letters – had never been. I became very animated about the mêlée of anarchic celebration that used to be the campsite when the race was still at Paul Ricard in the far wilder south, near Bandol. I raved about the lunatics who would remove the header pipes from their bikes then rev the motor at full throttle. It doesn't take a genius to see what’s coming next.

Ever equipped with a decent tool kit, I set about the GSX-R. Working by torchlight with double vision slowed my progress somewhat and the rest understandably got bored and went to bed. It must have been 4am when I carefully wheeled the bike into position, the exposed exhaust ports as close as possible to the doors of the sleeping couple’s tent. I’d strapped the throttle full open with a bungee so I could watch the effect from a distance. I could hardly bear the excitement. I pressed the starter and ran.

If you’ve never heard the unfettered racket from a pipeless large capacity engine at full tilt, it’s hard to describe, but it’s fair to say that it’s highly disturbing on a deep, gut-churning level, perhaps like some infernal machine Satan might use to instil naked fear. And that’s rather apt given that I hadn’t anticipated the pulsing 12-inch flames that instantly set fire to the tent. I think I was in shock for a second or two, long enough to see the poor couple (in pyjamas!) fight their way out of the flames with ashen faces, thinking themselves engulfed by Gallic Armageddon. I rushed to the bike but couldn’t release the bungee (in my drunken panic I completely forgot about the kill switch).

My last memory of the whole sorry mess, other than Mrs Thingy and the Suzuki screaming in chilling discord, was of a rapidly advancing Anoushka who summoned all her might as a former Soviet discus champion to knock me out with a clean blow to the jaw. I must say, I’ve had better holidays.

It's an ill wind that blows nobody's mind

2009-03-27T09:50:00.008+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 15 February 2006

Fat, long and exceedingly slippery. Suzuki’s Hayabusa really is a marvel of aerodynamics and I remember thinking when it was launched in 1999 that the designers were brave not to be led by aesthetics, but by physics. Handing over large amounts of cash for a greased rhino with a jet pack up its chuff didn’t deter the punters, bent, as we all are, on speed.

A key tool in the development of fine aerodynamics is the wind tunnel and I first encountered one in 1968 while Global Sales Director at Triumph. We were involved in an exciting project aimed at increasing road bike top speeds by standard fitment of a highly aerodynamic fairing. It should have reaped great rewards, but while you can factor in all manner of known characteristics for raw materials, the same is not so easily done when one is dealing with a human mind. In particular, that of our new aerodynamics engineer, George Hardle. Such a tragic waste.

Over the years a friendship had been forged between Triumph and the Moto Guzzi factory and I'm proud to say that I’d had much to do with that process, going right back to the 1957 TT when, while working for Ariel, I’d got chatting to a couple of Guzzi mechanics looking after Bill Lomas’s race bikes. They spoke no English, but it’s amazing what sign language can achieve (including, unfortunately, gross misunderstandings. To this day I’m baffled as to how ‘Let’s go for a pint’ came across as ‘Your mother's breasts need milking’, but the Italians seem to have a sign for everything and an insult to match. Giuseppe and I can now laugh about it, but whenever we meet up I insist on showing him him the scar. Those Neapolitans are jolly quick with a blade). So, when Triumph wanted to use Guzzi’s famous wind tunnel at the Mandello del Lario factory to develop their new fairing, I managed to secure its use for the whole of March 1968.

George Hardle became a problem on our eighth day in the tunnel. He’d struck me as a curious character on joining the firm a month previously. He stood about 5ft 5in, was in his early 50s and carried a large paunch, gained, I imagine, from over eating as he was teetotal. He was bald except for a curtain of grizzled, mousy hair and had a bushier version of Hitler’s contribution to facial grooming. None of this was especially remarkable, but when one tried to look into his eyes they’d dart around and never meet your gaze. Basically, he seemed a little demented.

That day, our famous test rider, Les Colcroft, was on the bike and moving around to get the best aerodynamic position with the gale blowing full tilt. But the instruments showed a lot of drag still evident, despite (actually, because of, though no one dared say it) huge amounts of plasticine that Hardle had added to almost every surface of the fairing, remodelling it continually and with ever increasing fervour. By 3pm Hardle, beside us in the control room, was visibly distressed, pink face glistening with a sheen of sweat. He began banging on the thick glass of the control room window, cursing Colcroft for an inability to streamline himself effectively. This was nonsense and had more to do with Les being perched behind a fairing which, loaded with pounds and pounds of plasticine, looked like a five-year-old’s rendition of the head of a triceratops.

Suddenly, Hardle left the control room and entered the tunnel, the huge propeller still sucking air through full blast. Struggling to keep his feet, he pushed Les off the bike and jumped in the saddle, briefly assuming a racing crouch as his tie whipped behind him and his flapping trousers rode up to his knees. But within seconds he was off the bike and began punching and kicking the plasticine-laden fairing. Les stood by helpless, bracing himself against the wind blast, while Hardle pulled off huge chunks of plasticine, throwing them first at Les, then at the control room window. He really was in quite a state – if only it had ended there.

Leaving his tie in place, Hardle tore off his shirt, which stuck high against the wire mesh ahead of the propeller. He then dropped to his knees and pulled more plasticine from the fairing flanks and began stuffing it into his mouth. It was clear that he was having awful trouble chewing it, but he remained hunched and determined in the roaring wind.

I’m afraid my final memory of George Hardle is of him utterly naked except for brown brogues and a tie, pressing his waxy, hirsute body against the control room window, his genitalia distorted hideously against the glass. His teeth, revealed by a deranged grin, were covered in gobs of brown plasticine.

So next time you’re slipping through the air with 150 on the clock and more to come, spare a thought for George Hardle, well-endowed aerodynamics pioneer and long term resident of The Verniers, a rest home in Tipton for bewildered former engineers.

Top Ariel dealers recommend it

2009-03-10T14:18:00.008+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 21 January 2006

When an office junior at Ariel Motorcycles in the 1950s, it was decided I should be sent to investigate one of our dealers in nearby Solihull in Birmingham. They were suspected of rum shenanigans and I was to apply for the post of trainee mechanic, a position which, if I got it (I did), would enable me to report back to head office. I had my misgivings and didn't want to be what might now be termed a 'grass', but I had little choice if I was to keep my job.

JL Morris was a long-established dealer set in crumbling Victorian buildings in a dingy back street. JL 'Jimmy' Morris himself stayed mainly in the ramshackle office at the side of the showroom floor. My immediate boss, in fact the only other employee, was Charlie Hake, a 50-something mechanic of dubious morals and questionable hygiene. My introduction to Charlie came on my first morning. I was in need of the toilet and was directed by Jimmy Morris to the privy in the yard. I opened the door and there was Mr Hake, boiler suit around his ankles, hunched over his manhood in furious activity. I must have stood there for a couple of shocked seconds, long enough to prompt Charlie to say, 'Look kidda, either come in and gimme a hand or shut the bloody door.' I shut the door.

Over the coming weeks it became clear why the motorcycles being sold at JL Morris were ill-prepared and often displayed a bewildering array of faults and bodges. Charlie Hake simply couldn't keep his hands off his wedding tackle long enough to get any work done. His trips to the toilet were frequent and when not actually pleasuring himself he'd be talking about sex in all its forms while tweaking feverishly at his overalls. It was certainly an education for me and while it was many years before I learned the correct names for certain depraved acts, I soon became well versed in the vernacular.

Now, Jimmy Morris had a tan boxer bitch called Honey, which was allowed to roam freely throughout the workshop. On too many occasions to put down to chance, the dog would be missing at the same time as Charlie Hake. It was decided that the clinching evidence needed to get rid of Charlie was to catch him on camera in flagrante delicto with Honey the dog. So HQ supplied me with a Kodak Brownie and a flash cube.

Over the next few days I watched carefully when Charlie and Honey disappeared. It turned out he was leading the dog to a store room at the back of the workshop. What puzzled me was why this poor creature followed so willingly.

It was a Friday afternoon when I decided to take the plunge. I'd already planned my photo-assault, greasing the hinges of the store room door so I could ease it open without a tell-tale creak. Indeed, when the time came it opened silently and with the door ajar I could hear vigorous licking and slurping and already my mind was several steps ahead, awash with images of strange congress. On top of that there was a sickening smell of what I can only describe as warm meat. My stomach churned as I eased the door further open and carefully peeped inside. The scene before me was beyond anything I'd imagined. There lay Charlie Hake, flat on his back, overalls around his ankles, eyes closed in rapture as his arms reached back to grip the forks of a 1951 Square Four. Honey was paying close attention to his John Thomas with her big pink tongue, and why? It was smeared liberally with dog food. Suddenly there was a groan, Honey's lick rate increased, I pressed the shutter, scarpered, jumped on my Red Hunter and high-tailed it back to HQ.

The picture proved enough to get Charlie Hake the sack, and I believe the original print hung around at the Ariel offices for many years, being brought out at Christmas parties and the like. In retrospect, I do feel a little sorry for Charlie as his only wrongdoing, in my eyes, was the bodging of the bikes. I mean, who hasn't, at one time or another when feeding Tiddles or Fido, glanced at that marrowbone jelly and felt a flicker of mischief? Have I said too much?

Ginger kids, grands prix and donkeys

2009-02-20T11:49:00.002+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 5 January 2006

These short January days put me in mind of pre-season testing for MotoGP – or the 500 class as it was during my working life. As wind batters the shutters, logs crackle on the fire and while my lovely young wife Francesca nips upstairs to slip into something a little more comfortable I shall relax my grip on my stiff hot toddy and put into writing something which, were it ever to get into the public domain, could cause ructions. Is this the alcohol talking? I fear so, but...

The final four years of my full-time employment, leading up to my retirement at the end of 2000, were spent at Yamaha in the UK. While not officially linked to the 500 GP race team I was lucky enough to have close access due to my friendship with certain movers and shakers.

Back in 1997 Valentino Rossi first began scaling the slippery pole of GP stardom when he won the 125 World Championship at his second attempt. It was clear to us all that here was a star of the future. That year we’d had plucky Luca Cadalora and that lovely chap Norick Abe on the YZR but certain besuited gentlemen high up in Yamaha made it clear that for the next season they’d be bringing in a pocket rocket youngster. The team would get the latest YZR, the OWK1 (or the Owki-Cokey as it was ‘hilariously’ dubbed – I hasten to add not by me. Which reminds me, that coming season, following Simon Crafar’s first ever GP win at Donington Park, several of us performed, by way of celebration, a spirited late-night and rather adult version of the hokey-cokey in the paddock, with plenty of ins, outs and an abundance of shaking it all about. I could be wrong but I seem to recall a rather disgruntled Kenny Roberts Jr appearing outside his motorhome in tartan dressing gown and Kermit slippers, complaining about the noise. But poor old Kenny had had a terrible day on his dad’s KR3, so if indeed it was him then all must be forgiven as I sympathise utterly. My own father insisted on building me a bicycle instead of buying me the Elswick Hopper I’d been admiring in the local shop window. The result was acute embarrassment outside the school gates followed by a broken front tooth and a punctured lung. I now regret being so rough with father, but I was only 15, had a bit of a temper and didn’t know my own strength. After all, he'd tried his best with that bicycle given the restrictions of his wheelchair. I digress…).

We were at pre-season testing somewhere in Spain, can't recall where exactly. All was going well, with Simon and Norick putting in good times on the OWK1, but by the end of the first day there was still no sign of this fabled new boy. Just as the team was packing up for the evening, a taxi appeared and out stepped a diminutive figure with a shock of wild, curly, bright ginger hair. He introduced himself as Flamoes Beffen, an 18-year-old Dutch lad who, until now, was unknown to any of us. It was too late for any riding, so I offered to give little Flamoes – or ‘Flam’ as I very quickly dubbed him – a lift back to the hotel in my hire car.

As I drove we chatted. Like most Dutch, who are ever happy to accommodate foreign tongues, his English was excellent. He told me of his racing in the domestic 250 championship, where he’d finished a lowly 12th the previous season. However, despite uncompetitive machinery his talent must have shone through as Japanese talent scouts had approached him with a view to riding for Yamaha – and here he was. He seemed a nice lad, softly spoken and even a little star-struck, hardly daring to believe his luck, I don’t suppose. If only that luck had lasted just a little longer.

I’ve never had a good sense of direction (it was once said of me that I couldn’t find my own cock with both hands, but then my grandmother did have a colourful turn of phrase). So, becoming ever more enmeshed in one-way systems and crowded back streets, we found ourselves in a lively part of town as night fell. It was a very warm evening and I was absolutely parched, so I suggested we park up, have a beer at a bar and get our bearings. If I’m honest, I’d pinpoint that decision as being the catalyst for what was to unfold.

Well, one beer led to another, which led to another bar and another beer and some tapas. Flam started to relax and in fact became very animated, laughing at anything and anyone and singing Dutch drinking songs at the top of his voice. I quickly learned a chorus or two and we became quite a hit, the more we sang the more beer the barman provided for free. We must have been a strange sight, a grey-haired 62-year-old and a ginger dwarf both caterwauling in Dutch. If only it had ended there.

As I told the Spanish police, I remember nothing after crawling to the toilet, where I was found some time later, having divested myself of troublesome clothing, lying with my cheek on the soothingly cool porcelain footplate of one of those distinctive ‘hole-in-the-floor’ Continental toilets. Not my most dignified moment. The police were very keen to learn how I knew Flam and questioned me for some time – keeping me at arm’s length you understand – before letting me go. I never did find out why Flamoes Beffen was deported back to Holland and I refuse to go on rumour alone, because, as we all know, gossip and hearsay can distort things terribly. I mean, the donkey possibly, but the Jack Russell? He was only a small chap, but I just can’t see it.

So, things might have been very different for Yamaha’s 1998 season and after several more years, despite great riders such as Bayle, Abe, Crafar, Biaggi and Checa, it took Vale Rossi, as many of us had always thought, to finally wrest the laurels from Honda. But, you know, whenever I catch a glimpse of a ginger youngster, or indeed Ronald McDonald, or hear the distant braying of a donkey, I wonder what truly happened that night, and of what might have been.

Suzuki's GSX-R750 prompts a frank and revealing exchange of emails

2009-02-05T17:51:00.025+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 27 December 2005

From: deaconblue@purgatory.com
To: cyrilgreen@libero.it
Date: 12 October 2005

Dear Cyril

I read with interest your account in Bikes and Bikemen of the invention and naming of Suzuki's SRAD induction system. Now, you and I both know that the naming process was long and hard and took place at a seminar in Berkshire in April of 1995. As I recall, it wasn't you who came up with the acronym which was to grace the following year's GSX-R750T. No, in fact I coined Suzuki Ram Air Direct after several of your suggestions were rejected, including, if I'm not mistaken, High Air Intake Rate Yield, or HAIRY. I’m surprised you seem to have forgotten this, but am prepared to put it down to the heavy medication a man of your age and condition must be forced to endure. I look forward to seeing a letter in Bikes and Bikemen correcting the error.

Yours, Charles Deacon

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From: cyrilgreen@libero.it
To: deaconblue@purgatory.com
Date: 13 October 2005

Dear Charles

Many thanks for your message, but I feel I have to defend my ground on this one. I know for a fact that SRAD was coined by myself to great acclaim and relief from all involved after discussions had reached deadlock on day 18. You may not recall the decisive moment too well as I believe you were out of the room at the time on (yet another) toilet break. How is that nasty waterworks trouble, by the way? Incidentally, your embarrassing bladder-based 'accident' earlier that day could have happened to anyone suffering from chronic incontinence, although to have had the same mishap eight times in two weeks does seem a little unfortunate.
The fact that the problem was prompted by urethral chaffing during the 1992 Le Mans 24-Hour does make it seem a little more heroic, although as you were a mechanic, not a rider, I'm a little puzzled as to when this chaffing actually took place. It may well have been caused by going balls-out on something long and French, but I doubt it was the Mulsanne Straight. We'll say no more.
HAIRY, I'm afraid, doesn't ring a bell and I suspect your mind is playing tricks on you. It's only to be expected when a man suffers premature baldness, but you really must put that to one side, as I presume you do your rather fine toupee each night before bed.
Oh, and may I say that my only medication involves liberal doses of my lovely young wife Francesca and the finest Umbrian olive oil, usually taken separately, though not always!

Best wishes, Cyril
PS: how's the rash?

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From: deaconblue@purgatory.com
To: cyrilgreen@libero.it
Date: 16 October 2005

Cyril

Dear oh dear, you really are a bitter little man, aren't you? Do I need to send you a copy of the photo of me shaking hands with Masahiro Nishikawa as he congratulates me for my work on the GSX-R project? It would be a simple thing to take a quick snap of it in situ on my bedside table. No doubt you won't recall the photo being taken during Nishikawa's surprise visit to the seminar, as you were otherwise engaged in a maintenance store cupboard with a waiter you'd been chatting up at lunch. Or was that just another 'misunderstanding'? I'm sure 'the lovely Francesca' (or is that Francesco?) would be interested to hear all about it. Just write the letter, Cyril.

Charles

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From: cyrilgreen@libero.it
To: deaconblue@purgatory.com
Date: 27 October 2005

Charles

Please forgive my tardy reply, but I've had many more important things to do, such as fettling my small but lovely collection of motorcycles and tending to a troublesome boil on the dog's bottom.
It's a pity you had to bring up the incident in the cupboard with the waiter – and in such a threatening manner. Perhaps it's time to tell you that the photo you have cherished all these years is not, in fact, the GSX-R750T’s engine designer Masahiro Nishikawa, but rather Kevin Hom who worked at the Shell Minimart, Twyford. If you knew one iota about the team behind the GSX-R you'd know that Nishikawa has never sported an afro perm, is unlikely to be seen in a blue nylon snorkel jacket – least of all with the hood up – and didn’t, the last time I met him, have a lazy eye. We were all in on the joke, Charles.
As I recall, and you obviously do not, you then drank yourself unconscious in a self-congratulatory frenzy before being carried up to bed by the rather burly night porter. As a memento, I have in front of me as I type a rather interesting collection of snapshots. My word, it's not so much the length of those GSX-R750 conrods as the external diameter of the big-end. Ouch! Thank goodness for polished internals. And how are the old Chalfonts, these days?
If I were you Charles, I'd forget all about this whole SRAD business, before you make a complete TAWT of yourself.

Yours, still wincing at the thought

Cyril 'Polaroid' Green

Cyril witnesses first hand the advantages of a wipe-clean surface

2009-01-18T00:18:00.009+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 19 December 2005

I’m sure many of you enjoyed this year’s Motorcycle Show at the NEC in Birmingham, that thrilling coming together of the greatest bikes and equipment in a carnival atmosphere fuelled by fine food, refreshing ales and lovely girls. At least that’s what the marketing men would have us believe. I’m afraid my own experiences of the show were always rather mixed. To say I’m mentally scarred might be an exaggeration, but the flashbacks persist to this day. Luckily, my lovely young wife Francesca now knows how to handle me on finding me bolt upright in bed in the small hours, screaming ‘get the Bandit off the baby!’. Recurring nightmares are the worst.

However, my most vivid memory of the show didn’t happen at the show itself. 1982 was the show’s second year at the NEC, I was Suzuki’s UK and European Sales Manager and we had a beautiful GSX1100 Katana on the stand. After setting up ready for the show’s opening the next morning, several of us decamped for a beer or two at the Bartons Arms in Birmingham’s Aston district. This locally-famous Victorian-era pub was a lively place back then, full of local ‘characters’ and certainly not the place to start an argument.

One of my sales team, Andy Craven (30-something, single, balding, Star Trek enthusiast with fungal problems – I’m sure you get the picture) was wearing a now much sought-after Katana paddock jacket made from what can only be described as purest nylon. How it glistened under the pub lights. The evening was going well, with several pints of Brew XI lubricating the conversation as we stood at the bar, when an enormous chap, who might best be described as a skinhead, tapped Andy on the shoulder. As Andy turned around and gazed up, our laughter came to an abrupt halt. I have to admit that in Andy’s more irritating moments (that is, any time he was in your company) I’d often harboured vivid daydreams of him being beaten ferociously by broad-shouldered, heavily-muscled men with fists like steam hammers, yet with my dream seemingly about to come true I wasn’t sure I had the stomach for it. But, it must said, Andy had one of those very punchable faces.

‘It’s a sword, ay it,’ boomed the large youth in a distinctive Brummie twang.
‘What is? What are you talking about?’ Among Andy’s many failings was an inability to accurately judge potentially explosive social situations.

‘That, on yer back, mate. Katana. It’s a bloody big sword, ay it.’
‘It’s a bloody big bike actually ‘mate’,’ said Andy with a derisive smirk. He turned back to us with a sarcastic chuckle. I suspected his Essex accent wasn’t cutting a lot of ice at this point and my toes curled inside my shoes in grim anticipation.

‘Yowma rude little git, ay ya?’ said the skinhead, who then, extraordinarily I thought, walked away to the bar. As the rest continued with subdued chatting I watched as this chap ordered two pints of snakebite – the infamously punchy mix of cider and lager later banned in many pubs – downing them one after the other before leaving. I felt very relieved to see the back of him and got in another round.

I think it was the screaming women, and some men, who alerted me to the return of our close-cropped friend. He marched across the large pub creating a bow wave of back-stepping punters. In his hand he did indeed have a bloody big sword.
Andy, now a little worse for wear, was oblivious and still had his back to the approaching maniac. However, his attention was caught when the skinhead took up a splayed-legged, baseball batsman’s stance and whacked Andy’s backside with the flat of the sword.

‘THIS,’ he boomed, ‘is a fucking katana! The greatest killing weapon of all time and capable of slicing through a human torso in one stroke.’

Andy leapt the air and spun round, and was now facing the lunatic while gripping his freshly-thwacked buttocks. He had the expression of a cornered guinea pig. As the whole pub looked on, the skinhead lifted the sword in two hands high above his head then brought it down very slowly onto Andy’s scalp. He then slid the tip down his forehead, nose, mouth and chin (is it just me, or was all this rather homoerotic?). The sword came to rest on Andy’s thin brown belt and with a very deft flick of the wrists the belt and trouser waistband were cut clean through. I clearly recall that as everyone in the pub stood in rapt silence, ‘Happy Talk’ by Captain Sensible was belting out on the jukebox. I don’t think Andy appreciated the irony.

Well, I’m not sure if it was Andy’s custom to go without underpants, but if not he certainly picked an unlucky evening to do so. (Which reminds me of the time I was discovered lying in a lay-by, next to my neatly-parked Yamaha FZR1000 Genesis, my bottom half utterly naked and covered in butter. But more on that another time.) With Andy’s snipped slacks gathered in a heap around his ankles, a pair of pants would have helped in at least two ways. They'd have saved him from the humiliation of presenting the assembled throng with something not unlike a pink bar-end weight peeping from a ginger nest. And they would have baffled the high-pressure exit of that rather unfortunate by-product of extreme fright. I’ve seen such jet-like eruptions from cows in a milking shed, but never from a human. Everyone has their talents, it seems.

Those of you who know the Bartons Arms will understand how the Victorians’ extensive use of ceramic tiling on floors and, thank goodness, walls, came in rather handy during the subsequent clean-up process. And, you know, it’s true what they say about sweetcorn. Quite extraordinary.

Invention and insanity make cosy bedfellows

2009-01-09T15:08:00.009+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 27 August 2005

Ah, innovation! Motorcycles have often led the way in the search for more power, less weight and greater efficiency and the man in the street is lucky enough to be presented with the polished result of many years' research (there are some dishonourable exceptions, of course, such as Morbidelli's hilarious V8 and poor old Bimota's ill-judged V-Due). But over the years I've seen great men brought to their knees by the immense strain of research and development, and I’ve witnessed projects which, frankly, can only have been the fruit of troubled minds.

You may remember me telling you of Peter Cartwright, he of shaven dog and V5 lawnmower infamy. Well, on release from psychiatric hospital Peter was, for many years, shunned by the motorcycle industry and he hit rock bottom, his considerable engineering skills pitifully wasted in the sewage industry. However, in 1986 Peter won a Guild of Mechanical Engineers competition to develop an alternatively-fuelled power unit, the winning engine to be fitted in a new Honda-designed road bike. This was an exciting project for Peter, but I’m sorry to say that the results were predictably disastrous.

Things seemed to start well enough, but when no one had heard from him for a month, and following complaints from neighbours about the smell, police broke down the door to Peter's semi-detached house in Crawley. They were driven back by the stench and flies. Years in the sewage industry had influenced Peter’s thinking in a shockingly direct manner and, convinced he could create an engine to run on gases produced by composting human faeces, he’d got himself into
rather a mess.

Never the tidiest of workers, much of Peter’s carpets and walls were smeared in his ‘wonder fuel’. His own body’s production being insufficient for his experiments, health inspectors found what can only be described as an innovative but ultimately rather disturbing ‘turd catcher’ installed in the manhole in his garden so as to harvest his neighbours' motions. Dear oh dear. Peter still writes to me from his secure accommodation, but I've always handled the letters carefully since he will insist on using a distinctive brown ink.

And Yamaha's Deltabox chassis, now deservedly an icon, had a painful development. Though the history books show the preliminary Alphabox and Gammabox frames, we never hear of the mysterious Betabox. And with good reason. The Betabox shunned early work on a perimeter frame in aluminium and instead looked to do away with metals altogether, favouring modern plastics (though we're talking modern by early 1980s standards). Barry Sheene, a skilled mechanic and development rider, was involved in the first serious tests of the Betabox chassis at a secret session at Pau in France. When the engine reached full working temperature the plastic frame, while not exactly melting, certainly became worryingly pliable, bending alarmingly. By the time the bike returned to the pits it resembled a pregnant sow, its midriff sagging until the belly pan was almost on the floor. Sheene dismounted and summed up the future of the Betabox in his beautifully direct style, saying, "The Betabox? It’s not even stiff enough to f*** the designer up the arse with it." Barry had a great way with words.

Then there was the time a certain German manufacturer experimented with a new type of seat foam for extra comfort over long distances. However, it turned out that this foam, a by product of the sap of the South American quilombo tree, gave the 20-strong team of test riders such a fearful rash and inflammation 'down below' that it was branded the sitzenscrotenscratchenbloten (how do those Germans keep it so succinct?). Once the testers were released from the clinic they made a ceremonial bonfire out of all the known saddles and topped it off with an effigy of the seat’s chief designer. However, the intended celebratory atmosphere was rather tempered by the fact that everyone was still rather sore and those not hobbling about with an exaggerated John Wayne gait were sat on medical rings filled with cooling gel. Add to that a blaring soundtrack of the finest German heavy metal and I have to say it’s not the best barbecue I’ve ever been to.

Finally, I must mention the ill-fated Ariel Aqua-Skoot. Oh yes, wet bikes and jet skis are now commonplace, but when Edward Jones took to Coniston Water on a June morning in 1955 he was breaking new ground. Unfortunately, he also broke his neck in an effort to control the 500lb monster as, taking on water at a disastrous rate and the 600cc four-stroke twin revving to the heavens, it careered towards a family picnicking on the shore. His shrieks warned them in time, but the impact of his face with the family-sized pork pie was such that he had to be formerly identified by a tattoo of Norman Wisdom on his right buttock. Mind you, a by-product of the research into the Aqua-Skoot can be found today in the weather-proof seal used under the starter button on Suzuki’s GSX-R1000. So old Eddy’s death wasn’t completely in vain.

'I want to show you my big cock'

2008-12-23T14:00:00.013+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 12 August 2005

‘I want to show you my big cock.’ Such was my rather bewildering introduction to Gunter Blasen, consultant designer at BMW. I was reminded of Gunter when I saw BMW's brutally handsome K1200R in the flesh for the first time recently. Gunter was instrumental in changing the way BMW think about their bike design, although his tenure with the firm was rather short lived.

A few years ago I was asked by BMW to be part of a group assembled to offer honest opinion of their then current range and of their hush-hush plans for the future. It meant being away from home for a month, so I was anxious about telling my lovely young wife, Francesca. I found her in the kitchen, expertly tossing a caesar. She took the news well, however, saying that it would give her time to get to grips with our new gardener, Claudio, a muscular youth who didn't seem to know his basil from his backside but for whom Francesca clearly had a soft spot.

Although I'm lucky enough to have a well-travelled R1150RT in the garage, it seemed that taking it to the 'secret summit' in Bavaria would be too sycophantic, so for the blast up from my Umbrian hideaway I took the Ducati ST4 – and a big bag of tools.

The long day's ride on beautiful roads was marred only slightly by the mishaps. I know I'm not the only one to ever have suffered sprayback when filling their fuel tank, although I was especially unlucky that so much petrol went in my eyes. I screamed like a schoolgirl and ran to the toilets. Having rinsed my stinging eyes I went to the loo, but there must have still been petrol on my hands as for the rest of the day I suffered an irritating burning sensation 'down below'. While I was in the toilets someone used the keys, which in my panic I'd left in the ignition, to steal my panniers. They could have nicked the whole bike, so I suppose I should be thankful.

On arriving at the hotel that night my eyes were red and bloodshot, my face rotten-tomato blotchy, I reeked of unleaded and was fighting a losing battle to control the urge to continually rearrange my stinging peter. I could see the receptionist was most thrilled to be checking me in.

Later, on coming down for our welcome dinner, the Hawaiian shirt, tight snow-washed jeans and yellow flip-flops weren't ideal, but it was the best the hotel could rustle up from lost property given the theft of my panniers. My eyes were still pink, my face a patchwork of blotches and I must have resembled an ageing, drug-addled sex tourist (not helped by the fact that the old chap still demanded regular tweaking).

Dinner went well, I'm glad to say. We were a very eclectic bunch from all over Europe and varying motorcycling backgrounds. It was there that I was introduced to Gunter Blasen, seated next to me at the large table. After dinner, as we sipped the strong local abspritzen firewater, we began a debate on BMW quirks. Switchgear – innovative German design or Legoland freakery? Boxer engine – refined by almost a century of development or a throwback destined for Somalian tractors? Suddenly, Gunter stood up, leaned close to me and said: ‘Come outside, I want to show you my big cock.’ It was all I could do not to laugh, which would have been such an insult because despite Gunter's English being almost perfect he'd obviously got the wrong word this time. I guessed that he wanted to show me his bored-out Beemer, or something of the sort, so I followed him through a side door towards the carpark.

We stopped in a dark spot near the bins and I looked around for the bike. When I turned back Gunter did, in fact, have his old chap in his hand, and I have to say it certainly was enormous.

‘Cyril,’ he said, ‘I have noticed you winking at me all evening and you cannot leave yourself alone down there. Let us enjoy the moment!’

‘Ah, look Gunter,’ I said, ‘You've got it all wrong. I had a bit of a mishap today, and that's why I seem to have been winking, and as for fiddling with myself, well...’ And I went on to explain the situation.

If only it had ended there. I have to say, we'd both enjoyed perhaps a little too much wine and abspritzen, which perhaps explains why Gunter remained with his percy in his hand and why I decided to pop mine out to show him the burns inflicted by the petrol.

And I'm afraid that was the scene which greeted a top BMW executive strolling out to enjoy a cigarette – a German chap with a mullet proffering his unfeasibly large member, and an old boy dressed like a low-rent Miami pimp doing likewise with a rather less impressive specimen, the two of us apparently squaring up for a little pork swordery.

I left early the next morning and haven't been in touch with BMW since, and neither, so my source in the industry tells me, has Gunter. However, I'm sure I detect Gunter's influence in that big, bruising hooligan tool, the K1200R. I feel convinced he managed to plant a seed with at least one of the BMW designer chappies. Guten tag!

California, gender bending and tortoises

2008-12-12T14:26:00.009+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 30 July 2005

Ah, the heat of lazy summer days, the smell of scorched tarmac, the bitter-sweet thrill of a sun-baked black vinyl saddle. This time of year was made for motorcycling and when the mercury rises and resting fuel tanks gently whistle, I like to take off into the mountains on my Ducati Monster M1000S.

I was parked up last week overlooking a parched Apennine valley and tucking into a juicy panino slipped into my backpack by the lovely Francesca (who works wonders with a salami and a smear of olive oil). My mind was taken back to the permanent summertime of California where I was lucky enough to spend a couple of months in August 1971 working on an exciting film project with the BSA-Triumph group in my role as Global Sales Director. I'm sure you're all familiar with the great documentary film On Any Sunday, starring Steve McQueen. Well, BSA-Triumph decided to cash in on the film's success by creating its own version in which Triumph motorcycles would play a major part. The film was to be called Spank the Monkey! (these were more innocent times when it meant merely to enjoy the power of one’s machine) and its star would be Sean Connery. However, despite the best efforts of everyone involved, things didn't go exactly to plan. A humiliating farce? I’m afraid so.

The project ran into budgetary troubles almost immediately. BSA-Triumph could barely afford a buttered bun let alone the movie business, consequently, plans to commission the highly respected Bond film producer ‘Cubby’ Broccoli had to be abandoned. Many potential candidates were then sidelined as we searched for an affordable name. Alf Bishop may not ring a bell with many people, but when I tell you he was the genius behind the 1968-'73 British TV quiz show Nig Nog Golliwog I'm sure the memories will come flooding back (it must be said, the programme was a product of its time and nowadays not only unacceptable, but quite probably illegal). We considered ourselves very lucky to get Alf.

Of course, Sean Connery also fell victim to our meagre budget. As we went down the list, through Dennis Waterman, a young Mike Read and even the keen motorcyclist Dick Emery, it was clear how desperate things were getting. Eventually, salvation arrived in the shape of a young amateur actor who, better still, was useful on a bike, having been spotted on waste ground handling his big thumper with aplomb. (I must say, I do enjoy taking out my own lusty mudplugger on balmy evenings, much to the delight of certain of the local lads.)

However, there was something about Ashley Clarke that unsettled me, yet I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. But the board were getting jumpy and decided that his rather effeminate voice (I'd say Catherine Zeta-Jones being throttled by a large-handed maniac) could be dubbed over at a later date – such was the muddled thinking which had already permeated the project.

The first week's shooting ended badly after an almighty row with director Alf Bishop, who had hijacked what was an admittedly loose script and decided to insert his 'trademark'. This entailed 20 black and white minstrels riding pillion through the Californian desert, complete with straw boaters and canes. It was clearly ludicrous, though perhaps not quite so ludicrous as the mass brawl that ensued when I requested security remove the disgruntled minstrels from the set. Mammy!

A couple of days later things turned especially strange. We were out in the desert shooting a scene where Ashley comes charging through the scrub, kicking up a trail of dust on a lovely, high-piped Triumph TR6C. Unfortunately, he swerved rather violently in a noble attempt to avoid a desert tortoise. The result was a spectacular end-over-end crash which left Ashley squealing like a stuck pig with what appeared to be a broken leg. The medics were on hand very quickly and having administered enough morphine to render him not only silent but putty-like, proceeded to cut away his leather jeans.

Well, as jeans and underpants came away as one, my misgivings and Ashley’s curious traits all began to make sense. Ashley Clarke had quite the strangest set of ‘meat and two veg’ any of us had ever seen. It turned out that he was, in fact, a transsexual who, until very recently, had been Andrea Clarke (not the Brit porn star from the 80s, she came later). The last turkey in the shop with which the gathering crowd was presented was the result of many hours of surgery, but
by the look of it there was still a fair bit of tidying up to do around
the edges.

With our main rider out of action, the project folded. But wouldn’t it be superb to see John Bloor and Hinckley Triumph pick up the reigns and make a modern-day Spank the Monkey? A Bonneville Scrambler powering through the Baja California desert, perhaps with 'Right' Charley Boorman in the saddle? What a marvellous thought that is.

For Cyril, the Gold Wing’s anniversary brings painful memories from 1975 flooding back

2008-11-28T09:08:00.006+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 14 July 2005

Has there ever been a better time for touring on a motorcycle? I’m very impressed by recent sports tourers such as Triumph’s Sprint ST and the BMW R1200RT. But the most famous out-and-out tourer must be Honda’s Gold Wing, now in its 30th year, and I was lucky (or rather, unlucky) to be involved in its 1975 UK launch.

Although now huge, with all the bells and whistles, back then it was far simpler, unfaired and considered quite sporty. The term ‘sports tourer’ could have been applied to that first Gold Wing and we at Honda UK decided to plan a high-speed route through France on which to send journalists for the launch. It could have been a magnificent showcase for this most wonderful machine. Sadly, the event never made it past the reconnaissance trip, which I’m afraid descended into a humiliating farce.

A team on three pre-launch Gold Wings were to plot the route and find suitable hotels. The embarrassingly-named Ooh La La Tours were charged with the task and I, as UK sales executive, went along to oversee proceedings. And as we were keen to test how she handled two-up, my wife Teresa also came along. Ooh La La’s owners, Australian brothers Craig and Stewart Jenkins, took a bike each as they flatly refused to share one. How ironic that turned out to be.

The first day’s brisk ride down to Cramouille, just south of Limoges, went smoothly, leaving us very impressed with the Gold Wing. I was glad to see Teresa getting on well with Craig and Stewart as I was keen she wouldn’t feel out of place. I’d married Teresa only a year previously (after my first wife absconded with a mechanic, and I’ve heard all the ‘bigger tool’ jokes, thank you). Many of my friends were openly jealous that I’d married a woman who, at only 28, was ten years my junior. She certainly was an ‘athletic’ and rather demanding girl and I very much enjoyed losing more than a stone in weight in our first year together.

That evening, what with the day’s ride and a large dinner, I was exhausted. By 11 o’clock my eyes were so sandy I left the others ordering brandies and chatting about Mott the Hoople or whatever. Despite Teresa’s raucous laugh breaching two floors, I fell asleep quickly, images of the French countryside playing on the inside of my eyelids as I drifted off. (Which reminds me, I had a similar experience many years later when overseeing the Yamaha YZF-R1 launch. Flashing white lines and rushing tarmac played across my closed eyelids as I gently fell asleep. Unfortunately, I was still riding and very lucky that the picnicking family were so understanding).

The next day we began scouting locations for the press photographers. I was keen to get started but neither the Jenkins brothers nor Teresa surfaced before 10am. By the time we left I was rather wound up, which probably contributed to the following ‘incident’. In my defence, controlling a 1000cc motorcycle on a tightening, gravel-strewn mountain bend is hardly enhanced by a woman screeching, ‘I need a f***ing p**s you b*****d’. Although I finally lost control when, clutching my helmet, she shook my head from side to side like a bladder on a stick.

It was hardly an accident at all. I’d almost brought the Wing to a halt when we toppled over, but it was the noise the goat made as the Dunlop Gold Seal thumped its midriff that upset Teresa. I can only liken it to the honk I imagine would be made if one were to jump off a five-foot wall onto a fully-inflated bagpipe. Teresa refused to ride with me from that point, foisting herself instead on Craig.

Later, we split up to explore separate areas and I enjoyed several hours’ peaceful cruising. If I’d noticed that the prang had cracked the crankcase I wouldn’t have ended up stranded with a seized engine in the middle of nowhere. Mobile phone? Ha! This was 1975. It took me six hours to walk and hitch back to the hotel, by which time it was gone midnight.

There was no sign of the others so, clutching a sandwich kindly made by the porter, I went up to my room. Teresa wasn’t there either. Then, from Craig and Stewart’s room next door, where I assumed they’d been chatting, came the distinctive gasping of Teresa in the throes of one of her asthma attacks. These could be life-threatening, but I knew the procedure well and speed was of the essence. I knocked on the door but all fell silent. Fearing the worst I put my Lewis Leather boots to the test and kicked open the flimsy lock.

This is not the place to describe the carnal act that confronted me, suffice to say it was not invented by Premiership footballers. It was a regrettable (and prior to witnessing it for myself I'd have argued physically unfeasible) incident that not only scuppered plans for the launch but also our brief marriage. I’m glad to say that Teresa received nothing in the split, so she was certainly left with egg on her face! And to think that those boys said they’d never share a bike. You live and learn.

It's 1965. Rumours of Honda’s impending 750 Four see Cyril sent to Japan for high-level talks in a bid to save the British bike industry

2008-11-14T09:07:00.014+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 15 June 2005

Kawasaki and Suzuki, once bitter rivals, now co-operate closely to produce very similar models such as the Mean Streak and Marauder, a situation that benefits them both. This is nothing new of course, and I recall the BSA/Triumph Group extending the hand of friendship to the Honda Motor Company in the mid 1960s. It could have marked a period of greatness for both firms, but I’m afraid the venture descended into a humiliating farce, the details of which I’ve kept hidden until now.

In the summer of 1965 the BSA/Triumph board heard rumours of a big-bore multi-cylinder bike being developed by Honda. So as not to panic the Small Heath workforce, the Honda project was always referred to by the codename ‘Steak and Kidney Pie’. As early as 1963 Bert Hopwood and Doug Hele had drawn up the three-cylinder engine for what would become the 1969 Triumph Trident. Our parallel twins were being pushed beyond their limits resulting in extreme vibration which, while helping lady pillions to a heightened state of readiness, left nerve-shattered riders unable to unfasten their own gloves, let alone complex female undergarments. Everyone was frustrated! However, despite problems with our overstretched engines the Japanese industry was seen by many of those in charge as nothing more than funny little men making quirky little bikes and of no threat whatsoever to the British industry, so for many years in the mid-Sixties the triple was shelved.

The Honda rumour changed all that and we Brits creaked into action, but certain board members saw ‘Steak and Kidney Pie’ as an insurmountable obstacle and that our best chance lay in co-operation with the enemy. It was decided that in my capacity as Global Sales Director I would be flown in secret to Tokyo to meet with the great Soichiro Honda, when I would bring up ‘Steak and Kidney Pie’ and the future of our companies.

In later years, such as during the development of Suzuki’s GSX-R1100 and then Yamaha’s YZF-R1, I travelled extensively throughout Japan and even picked up a little of the lingo. But in September 1965 this was my first long-haul flight and I was a naive 29-year-old from the Midlands. I hold that up as meagre defence for what was to follow.

I’ve never been a heavy drinker, but in those days there was little else to do on a long-haul flight and I’m afraid I began sipping the complimentary spirits as soon as London receded beneath a sheet of grey cloud. I was seated next to a chap who at the time would have been termed a beatnik. I found his slender sunglasses a little disconcerting, but we got along well, taking it in turns to choose the next tipple from the drinks trolley. Several hours in, Bernie, as he insisted I call him, produced a small brown dropper bottle and popped a couple of drips of clear liquid into our Johnnie Walkers. LSD was still perfectly legal, and although I hadn't the slightest idea what it was I decided (helped in my decision by Mr J Walker) that ‘turning on’, as Bernie put it, could do no harm. (Incidentally, ever wondered if habitual use of strong hallucinogens has a lasting effect on the brain? Bernie went on to be a freelance designer in the motorcycle industry and had a hand in such models as the BMW K1, Morbidelli V8 and Honda X-11. I rest my case.)

Thirty minutes after finishing my 'enlivened' whisky, things became a bit chaotic. Perhaps it was because Tokyo had hosted the 1964 Olympics that I seemed fixated by the Greco-Roman wrestling gold medallist Imre Polyak, for apparently it was his name I chanted while climbing over the seat backs in my underpants, smeared in the olive oil supplied with our meal. Air rage is now a common term, but back then I was lucky that grappling with whoever came to hand was seen merely as drunken high spirits. It appears I was pacified for a short while only to return to the fray. Apparently, I spread crushed peanuts up and down the aisle then skidded back and forth on what I clearly considered to be a speedway track. It’s claimed I was doing a passable impression of a methanol-fuelled single and bellowing, in a poor Kiwi accent, ‘I am Barry Briggs, eat my shale!’ Regrettably, I was again stripped to my underpants.

If only it had ended there. I have no recall of the incident for which I was detained by airport police, but I am eternally grateful to the lovely Japanese stewardess for not pressing charges. Neither my socks nor underpants were ever found and apparently upwards of 50 passengers were prepared to testify to the fact that I have a birthmark in the shape of Wales on the underside of my ‘percy’.

The meeting with Soichiro Honda? I’m ashamed to say that it never took place as I was deported after a gruelling five hours' interrogation. In any case, it turned out that the BSA/Triumph management had had a change of heart, having decided to fight the Japanese head on with new designs of our own, and had sent a telegram to my hotel telling me to abort the meeting. So really, it all worked out for the best. Except for the ensuing and catastrophic collapse of our motorcycle industry with the loss of thousands of jobs and many historic marques. But apart from that...

The anti-lock brakes debate takes Cyril back to his involvement with two very different development projects 40 years apart

2008-10-31T09:49:00.045+01:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 21 May 2005

Anti-lock braking is becoming a contentious issue as companies such as Honda fit it as standard. To some it’s a comfort, yet others consider that it robs them of ultimate control. My personal involvement with ABS brings back rather bad memories.

However, before I begin, I’d like to say that development work wasn’t always traumatic. In the summer of 1951 I was just 15 and an office lad at Ariel. Final testing was underway for a double-adult sidecar developed in conjunction with Watsonian and when the chance arose to attend a session at the test track I seized it with both hands. My duties involved no more than acting as ballast in the sidecar during laps of the course. Riding the 1000cc Square Four was chief tester Bill Jenkins and I was in the fully-enclosed chair with development engineer Stan Chesterton, a large man in his late 50s with a bushy, grizzled moustache stained by snuff.

I’ve always respected the impenetrable methods employed by these men of mathematics and on this occasion, however strange it may have seemed to my young mind, Mr Chesterton required weight distribution to be shifted each lap just before crossing the rippled, eyeball-shaking pavé section. I had to rise from my seat and sit squarely on his lap facing away from him while he gripped my waist tightly for stability. I recall it being vaguely uncomfortable because of the small torch in Mr Chesterton's trouser pocket, which, he told me, he always carried 'just in case'.

This methodology, and the fact that I was required to wear nothing more than swimming trunks, may seem unconventional in today’s computer-driven world and as a naive teenager I could only guess at the good I was doing. But, as a breathless Mr Chesterton explained, he was receiving a lot of extremely satisfying feedback and a mere 212 laps later our work at the track was complete. Mr Chesterton seemed utterly spent, such, I imagined, were the complex calculations he'd been working on in his mind. It was good to know that, in a small way, I had helped in the birth of what became the best-selling sidecar of 1952 – the Intruder Senior.

But back to braking. Many years later, in the early 1990s, I worked for a major bike firm that was experimenting with ABS (my lawyers insist that the company remains nameless). BMW and Honda had ABS-equipped bikes on the market and we were keen to get on the bandwagon with a tourer based on a bike not unlike the GSX1100F.

We took the prototype to the Lucas research department’s skid-pan near Coventry and present that day was myself, chief engineer Keith Armstrong, the test rider Chris Allworth and, to record his observations, Keith Armstrong's secretary Marjorie Priors. It was an open secret that Keith and Marjorie enjoyed a little extra-curricular activity, and common knowledge that Keith and chief test rider Chris Allworth hated each other's guts.

For some reason, Chris decided that outriggers – to prevent the bike flipping onto its side on the slippery surface – were unnecessary. I think his exact words were, ‘Are you suggesting I’m some sort of poof?’ It seems daft now, but none of us realised just how slippery a wet skid-pan could be.

I heard Chris in the distance, counted up three gears and remember thinking that it would surely set him far too fast. He must have been doing 70mph when, as per correct procedure, he slammed on the front and rear brakes simultaneously and pulled in the clutch. The GSX hit the floor like a wet kipper. Bike and rider separated and slid on for 100 yards, coming to rest 25 feet from where we stood. Marjorie let out a scream and we all rushed to help Chris, lying flat on his back and very still, like a giant leathery starfish.

I’m sure you all know the frozen pond scene in Bambi. Well, Keith and I were in leather-soled shoes and Marjorie in heels, so none of us were suited to running on a surface with a friction co-efficient less than ice. Marjorie went down first, lurching forward, then back, arms flailing before landing with an almighty thud on her well-padded rump. The jolt was enough to dislodge her false teeth uppers, which skittered across the skidpan. Mortified, and desperate to get up, she grasped at Keith’s trousers, pulling them to his knees as his braces twanged and sending him into a crazy dance that ended in him landing on all fours, trousers like manacles around his ankles. I have to say, we were all rather surprised, except perhaps for Marjorie, to see a 52-year-old man wearing tight black satin briefs.

Chris sat up, pointing and laughing uncontrollably. Years of bad feeling came to the surface and a furious Keith lunged for the doubled-up Chris, who was struggling for breath between sobs of mirth. At that point, I was still standing and felt that I had to step in, but immediately trod on Marjorie’s top set, which snapped in two. I completely lost my footing, fell on my face and, rather appropriately, knocked out both my front teeth, one of which I must have swallowed as we never found it.

Still, my misfortune seemed to diffuse the situation. Chris, now uncontrollably amused by my gap-toothed expression, was in a panic to relieve himself and left the skidpan on hands and knees, guffawing like a braying donkey. Keith retrieved his trousers and poor Marjorie, broken choppers wrapped in a tissue in her handbag, left the bottom set in place, giving her a strange look reminiscent of that scrawny dog on That’s Life which said ‘sausages’*.

All of which is perhaps why to me the letters ABS have never signified anything more than A Buggering Shitstorm.

*Prince the dog on That's Life

'I’ve blown the arse out of the bollocking budget'

2008-10-14T11:28:00.033+02:00

From Cyril's memoirs dated 12 April, 2005

Honda's RC211V MotoGP bike is a wondrous machine and Simon Hargreaves’ report in February's Bike magazine showed how HRC has made a racing weapon feel so like its road cousin. But I had to smile, because more than 40 years ago BSA had great plans for a V5 grand prix racer with road-based spin-off.

In the late Fifties the BSA race shop boasted some fine engineers, not least Peter Cartwright. Peter had a fierce intelligence but an explosive temper, a combination that did his career no favours. I recall one meeting when Peter clashed with chief accountant Bob Crowley about race team investment. Bob should have known not to goad Peter in an afternoon meeting as Peter was ever primed by a liquid lunch in the Pen & Wig pub. Despite a vicious assault Bob recovered quickly, with the aid of an inflatable rubber ring, although the disturbing nature of Peter’s undeniably innovative attack meant chocolate finger biscuits were never again served in meetings.

I digress. In late 1958 Peter was asked to develop a racing engine with a vee formation, something the Japanese factories and indeed Ducati would later adopt with great success. Guzzi’s marvellous V8 had been retired before reaching full potential when the firm withdrew from racing that year and BSA saw the chance to pounce. Although Peter later achieved great things with Suzuki’s grand prix V4 of the Nineties, even in the Fifties he felt that a V5 was the way forward. He fought hard to get his ideas approved – literally at times. He was a small man but I often saw him stripped to the waist (or indeed from the waist, which was far more disconcerting), blue eyes blazing, ‘offering out’ all comers in his broad Brummie twang. Despite these antics he was given the go-ahead in spring of 1959. I’m afraid what followed is a dark chapter in both BSA’s and Peter Cartwright’s history.

Working in overseas sales I had no direct link with the project but was a good friend of Peter’s, perhaps his only friend. One day he called me to his secluded workshop. ‘Cyril,’ he implored, ‘you’ve gotta help me, mate. I’ve blown the arse out of the bollocking budget and I’ve done bugger-all testing.’ By his beery breath I suspected that, by contrast, the Pen & Wig’s budget was looking pretty healthy. He begged me to meet him at the firm’s test track that Sunday. Rather rashly, I agreed.

I arrived at the deserted track on a chilly April morning. The works Austin van was parked at the head of the straight and as I approached I heard what sounded like a very loud electric shaver. I knocked on the rear doors, but there was no reply. Walking round to the far side of the van I was shocked by what I saw. Wedged into the frame of one our road models was a monstrous engine. Yes, it was a vee set transversely like the Guzzi’s, but it was a sprawling mess of fins, tubes and brackets. I stepped closer and bent down. On part of the hideously cobbled-together crankcase was a section of the word ‘Qualcast’ and I could see dried grass cuttings wedged between the fins on the barrels. It was clearly cobbled together from a lawnmower. Perhaps most strangely of all, a pair of stabilizers from a child’s bicycle were attached to the back of the machine.

Then there was a terrible yelping, barking and shouts of panic. The van doors burst open and Peter’s border collie, Hailwood, bounded out. The dog was clean shaven from the tip of its nose to its midriff and the rest of its coat was clipped close and covered in shaving soap. It stopped momentarily on seeing me, then took off into the distance. I found Peter sitting in the van on an upturned beer keg, balding head in hands, electric shears and a razor at his feet. He was wearing nothing but a pair of brogues and his underpants and was covered in lather, dog fur and some nasty nips from Hailwood.

As I dressed his wounds, a sobbing Peter explained all. The development money had long since been ‘pissed up the wall’ on strong ale and a rather accommodating ‘professional lady’ from the Pen & Wig. Peter had then carried out a spate of garden-shed burglaries for the raw material for his racer. With no budget left for track time or riders he’d planned to performance test by guiding the bike using a rudimentary radio control system. For ‘added realism’ – and those were his exact words – he’d intended to strap the shaven Hailwood to the bike dressed in a tightly-fitting woollen bodysuit knitted by his mother. At this point, it must be said, Peter was a very confused man.

And so, many years later, I was extremely happy to see Peter gain the success he deserved as one of the engineers behind Kevin Schwantz’s 1993 World Championship win with Suzuki. However, it can be no coincidence that Schwantz was never once seen at a race meeting with a be-pelted pet of any description. Kevin always did his homework.