RIOTOUS RIDES
What fun to see not just one but two accounts of horror-filled spins back in the care-free 1970s in recent issues of RC. I really could empathise with Stu Thomson’s trip on scooters over the Alps to Grindelwald, and Paul Phillips’ recollections of riding an ailing Norton to Ireland in arctic temperatures. It’s what is so jolly about RC, especially when compared with other gleaming leather and superbike mags.
In 1973, my then girlfriend and I set off to Italy on a blue Ural M66 with sidecar. My brother was close behind with his girlfriend on a Velo 500. Although he had many, many problems with the Velo, he arrived in Tuscany where our mother lived a full six days before we limped into town.
The Ural hated the rain-swept and endless country roads of northern France. It hated the
AAlpine tunnels through wwhich it crawled at 35mph with juggernauts on its tail. My girlfriend hated sitting in four inches of water in a sidecar which had no roof. My girlfriend’s mother hated me because she had loaned us a brown suitcase to augment my Craven panniers and it was reduced to pulp after the trip.
On arrival, our mother (aka the walking chequebook) had the Ural fettled by Bertini’s Ducati dealership. It then took three of us to the seaside town of Via Reggio. On the way back, there was a frightful bang and the combo ground to a halt on one of those endless motorway viaducts on the Autostrada del Sole.
‘I think we passed a phone box in that lay-by about a mile back,’ I said to Ma. ‘As you speak Italian, perhaps you’d better go back and ring for the Italian AA.’
She trudged off and returned 40 minutes later. The phone box had merely been a waste bin. After dusk an Italian RAC equivalent rescued us and towed the combo back at about 75mph. I wrestled with the flapping handlebars, choking in diesel fumes, while my women perched in comfort in the driver’s cab.
After the long five week summer holidays, it was time to return to the UK. The Ural was having problems getting above 30mph with its heavy sidecar, so I decided to remove it and return with the frame only. What seemed OK in the side roads of Tuscany was less so over the Alps. My girlfriend stood on the bare chassis to keep the wheel down on the Alpine hairpins. When we arrived in the UK, the Ural was borrowed by my brother and stolen within a week. Before it went he discovered that the lack of a rubber gasket between carbs and cylinder heads was causing fuel to evaporate and ruin its ‘performance’ – not a problem in Siberia, of course.
I bought a Reliant Robin to my girlfriend’s delight and we married two years later. What a woman!
Simon Potter, member 4608
Brilliant stuff. How we all long for those faroff days of endless breakdowns, mechanical disasters and… Hang on! What am I saying?