Wave Fronts

Resumed Hobby

This is "EverEvoRevolution", a heavily modified 2001 Yamaha R6 lovingly prepared and raced by Dwayne in Georgia and now in my barn:

My first steady job was delivering newspapers in Montgomery, Alabama. My Dad was helping put together a pair of SAGE computers at Gunter AFB and I needed money to build a chemistry lab in the little storage building on the back of our carport. But delivering newspapers while walking is only fun if you have an apartment route and I wouldn't have that until years later in Huntsville (while my Dad was helping SCI deliver S band transponders into the Saturn V Instrument Unit). I threw my first route on the fat-wheeled bicycle my folks bought me but in addition to finely powdered zinc and sulfur and the gas fittings for a Bunsen burner, my first route underwrote a three speed bike. I was the only person in my part of Montgomery with one of these, as far as I could tell ("Is that one of them Furrin bikes, Leroy?"). I still remember being unable to resist testing the front brake while going down the driveway and doing a reverse wheelie and having to swing off the handlebars as the bike was momentarily describing a 70 degree angle. OK: brakes powerful enough! With generator-driven lights that bike took me all over town, singing under the streetlights with generator whine. And I could go up steep hills without much effort, passing the other kids pushing their single speed, fat-tired bikes.

But I naturally wanted more, and in Alabama at the time it was possible to get a motorcycle-only license at age 14, as long as the power was "governed to 5 horsepower or less." So soon after my 14th birthday (in Huntsville) I was riding an 80cc Yamaha street bike home in a very wobbly manner, stalling the engine more than once as I learned to slip the clutch from a standing start. It took me about one minute to remove the "governor", a plastic restrictor plate in the carb. The chem lab had been replaced by an electronics workshop and I recall one of my early purchases with my motorcycle-augmented newspaper career was an EICO 5' oscilloscope kit, which gave me absolute respect for high voltages when I put my elbow on the CRT plate potential. Much later I would learn to the name for this kind of episode: one trial learning!

Now luckily for me I had a riding buddy: Billy Elston. Bill was selling oil drilling tools the last time we argued politics 10 seconds after saying "hello" on the phone a few years back. But as kids we were soul mates and Bill's slightly older age kept me out of a lot of narrow places as we rode our bikes on every piece of pavement and most dirt and gravel roads in Madison county Alabama (we practically memorized where all the stones were placed). But Bill was actually the wild man. Our second bikes were identical 150cc Honda two cylinder four strokes and I once died a thousand deaths watching Bill stand up on his seat and hold his arms out as we rode side by side down a street at maybe 35mph. It seemed to take him five minutes to complete that stunt and get back onto his seat and I remember thinking "I'm going to see my friend maimed or killed." But, apart from a broken arm when a car turned left across his lane one time, Bill made it through the motorcycle experience without injury and my approach to riding settled down to developing learning strategies for minimizing risk while maximizing thrill factor and skill level.

As Billy was finishing high school I got my third bike, an Isle of Man TT replica Bultaco Metralla. It was a 5 speed, single cylinder 250cc, 35hp, 250 pound two stroke with the most powerful brakes and stickiest tires anybody in Huntsville had ever seen at the time. It was around 1966. My Dad loved to ride that bike! Here's a picture of a nearly identical Metralla:

Here's how I exercised this bike the way its makers intended. I delivered my newspapers on Sunday mornings around 4-5am (remember the apartment route I built? 145 papers delivered in just a few minutes!). Then I'd slip up to the northeast corner of Huntsville and up the "back side" of Mount Sano, which gave Werner von Braun and his fellow scientists a little relief from the Alabama heat during the years they worked in the space program there. I don't know if Werner was ever awakened by me riding nearby or not. I couldn't afford a tuned pipe and was always concerned in case a too-loud exhaust would annoy anybody. So the Metralla exhaust was stock, but still a bit loud compared to the more civilized Honda 250. In any case, I tip-toed up the mountain to a loop of the state park roads that formed a six mile "circuit" and just after dawn when the dew had evaporated I began to turn laps on that circuit. The tricky bit was that I could never be sure nobody would be coming around the next curve head on to me. So I had to have a strategy for dealing with that at every point. At the time I believed I was riding in a completely safe manner that just happened to approach triple the 35mph speed limit. As I now realize I enjoyed an element of luck, as I never once encountered oncoming traffic, so I never had the chance to discover that maybe my corner exit strategy would be trumped by a driver's momentary trespass into my lane. As a great car mechanic in this area put it, that was before I grew more brains. But I never as much as scratched the Metralla until I sold it for funds to get me through my second year at Auburn (but I transferred to U of A Huntsville after my 4th quarter there).

But I got pretty good on that patch of mountain road and earnestly wished some other motorcycle or car would be on that road going in my direction. It wouldn't have mattered much what it was, as, if the driver or rider hadn't also practiced a great deal, I would have simply run away from them as if their engine had quit, while staying in my lane when it was critical, stopping at the stop signs and signalling the turn between roads, etc. I'm sure I hold the lap record for that patch of road, at least for Sunday mornings. Alas, it was washed down the mountain by a landslide years ago and doesn't exist anymore. Here's a shot of one of the overlooks a little below my "private circuit." That's dear friend and former and eventual workmate Dave Blalock balancing a cloud on his finger to celebrate our creative adventures of the day while chatting in my hotel room.

Flashing forward to the present, I decided to resume motorcycling as a serious hobby, so I've bought a seasoned, race-ready Yamaha R6 and I intend to learn how to ride it to its limits. I've lost 30 pounds, said goodbye to blood pressure medication (danged lying Intel 80186 salesman forcing us at Network Products to redesign/reimplement around a 68k in under 6 months caused that blood pressure problem in 1982), and I've been carrying my heavy backpack around on the fingers of my left hand to prepare my forearm muscles for Evo's Barnett clutch. Between Virginia International Raceway, CMP in Kershaw, SC, and Barber Motorsports Park outside of Birmingham I've got enough decent tracks to keep me occupied. But for now this bike sits under canvas with its fuel stabilizer in the tank, waiting for skins with NESBA #616 on a yellow background and waiting for other aspects of the fullness of time.
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Posted at 06:05AM Sep 07, 2006 by microwaves in Motorcycle Road Racing  |  Comments[1]