Heat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.