Fox me! Fox me!

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.

Kevin, camping and carnage

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.