Black Bultaco meets black cat
In Melbourne back in the 1960s and ‘70s if you were into Bultacos there was a place you had to visit – Bert Flood’s shop in Whitehorse Rd. Box Hill.
I did, because even a four-stroke 500 single ‘Velocette Tragic’ like me found the diminutive Spanish 250 cc two-stroke Metralla road bike strangely alluring. It was something to do with the grace and simplicity of that heavily finned motor with its rounded crankcases and the curved symmetry of the fuel tank and the exhaust system (even if for the Australian model you still had to carry around little cans of 2 stroke oil).
OBA ran a feature on the Metralla back in Issue #25 in which Bultaco aficionado John Somerville wrote: “The type of person who bought these bikes fell into two categories. (1) Those who knew just how well these bikes went and were not blinded by all the chrome and lights of the Japanese bikes at the time, and (2) Those who bought them just because they were the cheapest 250 at that time (In 1967 the Metralla Mk2 had a retail price of $640.00 in NSW).” I think I fell into both these categories. Bert Flood had a second-hand, ex-competition but street legal black and silver Metralla Mk2 in the window and the asking price was just within my range, so late one afternoon, I bought it. I remember Bert telling me that it had a racing piston and barrel with overlapping ports that produced power at high revs rather than bottom-end torque. And there were other caveats. John Somerville reckons that Bert Flood was the best Bultaco tuner in the world at that time. By the time Bert had finished doing the roadworthy and paperwork it was dark and I proceeded to ride home on which I discovered two things about the bike: firstly, Bert was right, there was nothing down low, if you let the revs drop the engine would bog down, but once the revs picked up it accelerated at warp speed; secondly, the headlight though apparently ‘street legal’ was pathetic. On low beam there was a yellowish pool of light on the road in front of the bike which fortunately got a little brighter at high revs but conversely got duller at low speed. High beam had no penetration into the surrounding darkness whatsoever (unless you happened to miss a gear shift and accidently hit the engine’s red line, causing the headlight to flare like a searchlight beacon, illuminating high-flying aircraft, passing asteroids, distant planets, stars etc.)
So, I was riding my new pride and joy home very sedately. It was a dark moonless night. I entered my street and was only about 50 meters from home when suddenly in the faint pool of headlight I saw a black cat streak across the road right in front of me. With instinctive reaction I grabbed a handful of front brake to discover that the bike also had competition brake linings fitted and so the front wheel locked and down the road on its side went the bike, emitting sparks as it went, and coming to rest in the gutter outside the next-door neighbour’s house. I was unhurt but I was livid for crashing while riding so carefully, on my first ride and only meters from home. “Bloody stupid cat, bloody owner should lock it up at night”, etc. The bike was only slightly damaged but now had some road rash along the length of its slender tapered stainless steel
muffler (sob).
What does it mean if a black cat crosses your path? It all depends on what type of person you are. If you are a superstitious person it means you believe you will either have bad luck or good luck dependent on which country you come from, or if the cat crossed from left to right or right to left. More superstitious people believe it means bad luck than good luck because of the cat being black, the colour of night, the Devil and witchcraft. If you are not a superstitious person you would probably agree with
Groucho Marx, who when asked this question said “it signifies that the animal was going somewhere”, nothing more, nothing less.
The Metralla became my bike for all seasons: used daily to get to work in rain, hail or shine; and for the odd bit of sports riding on the weekends. I was living in Burwood (eastern suburbs) and teaching at a high school in Reservoir (northern suburbs), a fair distance by a convoluted route, which meant that I had to give way to peak period commuting traffic on my right both morning and afternoon.
As nimble a handler and as rapid an accelerator as the Metralla was, I have to admit that it wasn’t well suited to the jack-of-all-trades role I had cast it in, especially that of a city commuter bike. The combination of a competition engine, the all-or-nothing braking performance of competition brake linings, together with skinny road tyres of average quality rubber all contributed to sub-optimal adhesion levels, but boy, could that thing go. These characteristics made riding to and from work an absolute nightmare, especially when it was wet, as it required making a constant stream of risk assessment decisions, and adrenalin overload from having to anticipate poor risk assessment decisions by other road users. Every morning I needed an extra strong cup of coffee when I made it to the Staff Room and it was ‘straight to the pool room’ for a beer when I made it home again. If quality is defined as ‘fitness
“As nimble a handler and as rapid an accelerator as the Metralla was, I have to admit that it wasn’t well suited to the jack-of-all-trades role I had cast it in, especially that of a city commuter bike.”
for-purpose’, then it became clear that I had made a poor quality decision about bike selection.
The final ignominy came one Friday afternoon after the School dismissal bell had rung and a coterie of my students gathered in the staff car park to watch Mr Carmichael kick start his bike and ride off into the sunset. The Metralla’s kick start is on the left hand side, and with the bike on its centre-stand it started first kick and sat there idling bumpily while I mounted, swung the bike off the centre stand, clicked it into first gear, fed in the clutch, opened the throttle and shot off backwards crashing into a bicycle rack behind me. The students of course were clutching their guts or rolling on the ground killing themselves laughing while I tried to regather my dignity by putting bikes back into the bicycle rack. Then I suddenly remembered Bert Flood warning me that the overlap of the intake and exhaust ports sometimes allowed the engine to run backwards (albeit run poorly). John Somerville estimates that this only happens once in fifty thousand starts (it had happened once to him too) it was just bad luck that my particular audience was watching when it did.
So, did a black cat crossing my path cause this to happen? Well, I’m not a superstitious type, so the answer is of course not. These events can be adequately explained by examining the decision making processes involved or, as in this particular case, by the laws of probability and thermodynamics. But if you are looking for a scapegoat to cover responsibility for making stupid decisions, then a black cat crossing the ill-lit path of a black Bultaco on a dark night is as good as any. It was bad luck for me and the Bultaco that the black cat chose that exact moment to, in Groucho’s phrase, “go somewhere”, but it was good luck for the cat that it wasn’t run over – it all comes down to probabilities. But what was I thinking buying what was basically a road-racer to use as a daily commuter?
Mind you, a close friend went one better – he was known to commute across London on his 1,000 cc Bimota! The law of probabilities was favourable to us both – we survived, but it’s a moot point whether this was due to luck or to rider skill, most probably it was a bit of both. Not long after I had crashed the Bultaco riding it backwards, I sold it and rode trailbikes for a while, but that’s another story.