WAR STORIES - THE TWO WHEELED KIND

What precipitated this thread was kind of just a free association from an another thread on the site. So, here we are. War Stories would be construed as anything that happened to you when you were riding your two wheel vehicle, can be anything but a bicycle. See where it goes, first time as a thread starter; so have at it.

 

On my 16th birthday, I opened a box that had an Arai Freddie Spencer Supervent and was told by my parents they would match every dollar I made for my first Street bike.

It turned out to be a 1984 VF500F. Bought it in 1985 for $1500 and it had 1500 miles. It was fucking sweet and I have zero pictures of it somehow. I did the usual and painted the wheels and turn signals white, plus a couple other small pieces. My friends uncle sprayed white lacquer for me and I wet sanded and polished everything out.

This is the story of wrecking that bike. I'll try and set the scene as best I can.

Just a couple miles from my house, very near the High School, is (was) a weird intersection where 3 roads come together. One from the west by the High School, one from the south going by the Fire Station (pretty much right at this "intersection"), and the main road that veers right (SW) at the intersection. The fire station has a phone booth on the corner. More on that later. I'm traveling South from my house on the main road. The other roads have stop signs and there is this triangular "island" in the middle of where all of the roads converge. The island just had its ditches all cleaned out with a backhoe and they are now perfect half pipes.

Think of a capital A with the Fire Station at the right "intersection", and I'm going from the top to the lower left. The island is the center triangle.



Following my friend (on his 84 500) doing 50 to 55 (in a 35). As we approach and enter this bend (that we always sped thru) a truck passes on my left just before my front end washes out sending me sliding on my palm/knee/hip. I just go by his rear bumper. As I watch my bike sliding away from me, I'm thinking, "Shit. Gonna have some work to do after this" right before we both hit the half pipe. Smash cut to dirt and dust and the next thing I know, I'm rotating in the air watching my bike flip and smash down on the handlebars and fuel tank, pretty much upside down on one of the other roads, almost in another ditch.

The very next thing I find my self running down the road by the fire station and phone booth... AS FAST AS I CAN. Like the kind of running where you are going down hill and are on the verge of falling on your face, swinging your arms for balance. I fucking landed on my feet running after clearing the whole "island". Luckily I was in "my" lane of the Northbound road as a car was approaching from the opposite direction. We stopped next to each other. Judging from the looks on this family of four's faces, they watched me fly out from behind the "island" and land, running, with my bike smashing off to the left, now dumping fuel on the road in a heap. They all looked at me like I was a ghost. I'm standing right next to the driver's door, hands on my knees, trying to breathe. The phone booth is on the other side of the car, a little closer to the intersection, in the fire station parking lot.

The dad slowly rolls down his window and asks, "Are you OK?"

I slowly turn in my Freddie Spencer Arai, "yeah"

"Are you sure, you might be in shock"

"I'm not in shock. I'm pissed!"

I walk back to my bike, right it with the help of my friend who has turned around and start pushing it to a better spot. It's fucked, but barely rolls. Just then a truck pulls up. "You wanna load that thing before the cops get here?"

"Yes please"

It was the truck that I nearly plowed into the front of. The three of us lifted it into the bed and he drove me home. Unloading it when my Mom came out. "You OK?"

"Yeah. I'm pissed." I then started crying. My beautiful bike. We both thanked the dude in the truck. I was VERY lucky and not really hurt at all. Helmet was only dusty. Had a strawberry thru my jeans, but they weren't torn. Levi's jacket was also just dirty. Dianese gloves were just scuffed. I was fucking wearing Sperry Top-Siders boat shoes with no socks. (Yes, an idiot. That NEVER happened again). One grommet was ground half off right next to my ankle bone that didn't have a scratch. It was the worst Summer ever (senior year!), watching my friends ride their bikes around me while I drove.

So YEARS later I'm at a friend's party telling this story, which to be honest sounds like bullshit. I finish telling it and the small crowd around are just kinda standing there, with that look on their face. "Yeah.... right"

Just then a voice from the other side of the pool table room says, "It happened exactly like he just said." Everybody's head spun around and we were all, 'WHAT THE FUCK!!!???' "I was standing in the phone booth at the fire station and watched the whole thing."

He went to my high school, Freddie Guzman. I didn't even recognize him or know that he was at the party. That was fucking weird and a great bow tie on a good story.

 

I moved down to South Florida full time in 1998, I was able to pursue club level road racing where if I continued to live in North Jersey would have never been able to. I did take a Penguin Racing Class in Bridgehampton NY back in the early 90s. Living in Florida, I was working in a motorcycle shop that was involved in road racing and got a light weight sportsman bike to compete in that class (94 EX500) I bought it from a lady whose husband had been strong armed robbed and was in a coma. I remember buying the bike back in 99, it was on her back porch and her small son was climbing all over it. I race prepped that bike and proceeded to race the CCS races in South Florida (never made it to Daytona.)

It was not a big stretch to get into racing as I had all the gear, I had a trailor and I had a friend net work to work off of. I rode that bike for less than an entire season and bought a wrecked Ducati 900 SS which was a theft recovery and had parts missing including a CDI. More on the computer later, I spent the better part of six months messing with getting that bike road worthy. Race body work, yellow paint job, tyres, the whole shibang. The only thing we could not figure out was the fact that the CDI I was using as a donor unit would not keep the bike running, it turned out that my 1999 bike had some kind of side stand cut out switch, the computer I was using was not compatatible with my bike. The local Ducati dealership loaned me a CDI which made my bike run.

I was able to enter Heavy Weight Sportsman now, during warm up laps, I had the bike out on its maiden run and on the back straight got knocked off at triple digits speeds. Moroso (at the time.) I felt the rear of the bike lift off the ground and thats it! I remember it was hard to just crawl off the track, I looked around and there was a corner worker saying I looked like a lamed dog out there (farking arse hat, guess I can't blame him - why run out and risk your life when your getting paid with a baloney sandwich and some beer.) I was ok, as much as someone could be getting run over and falling at 130mph or so. When the EMS came they insisted on me going to the ER, so I got a nice helicopter ride to Mercy Hospital in Palm Beach. The cool thing was that my poor father was my race support/pit tootsy followed the helicopter to the hospital with my smashed race bike on the trailor behind the Grand Marquis.

I had all kinds of tests and scans and I think they gave me 8 or 9 IV bags. I had no broken bones but a huge hematoma on my back near my kidney. I had to wear pants that were a few sizes big for a month or so as I remember.

The bike was destroyed, I don't even have so much as a picture of the damn thing! I got into Ebay at that time, the parts went all over the world including the frame ironically, someone in NJ wanted a Ducati 900SS bent like a pretzel with title. This got me out of road racing for good, I never made it to Daytona but am satisfied. I asked my father why the hell he would let his only son do something so inherently dangerous, his reply was I did not want you to have to say later that you did do it. I ride on the street (which I enjoyed more than road racing) I commute 5 days a week on two wheels, when I travel to Europe I rent cars and I got to race tracks there (cars) and I still have a mint YSR50 that is kitted as a race bike, (so one day?) and my leathers still fit. Thats all I got for you, I gota make coffee and put my little monster to bed. Peace

 

I was working part-time at a Honda dealer while at University, and took quite the fancy to a pristine, second hand Vf750F. I persuaded the boss to let me take it home for a "test ride" and proceeded to explore the performance limits on a mostly-deserted country road at night. After completing the "just how fast will this thing go test?" (about 220km/hr IIRC) I decided to test the brakes as I hurtled up behind a slow-moving vehicle. I hit the brakes which locked and flipped the front end out to the left and me to the right. I did a Superman flying impersonation for a few feet and then hit the road and started tumbling at probably 160km/hr. The bike meanwhile pirouetted up the road in a shower of sparks, and I just kept tumbling until the momentum was gone. Thoroughly rattled, I decided to stand in the middle of a dark country road to stop the next car, which fortunately was the car that I had just crashed behind, coming back to look for survivors. They kindly drove me home, and I took the work pick-up back the next day to pick up a sorry-looking bike; it looked like a hammer and /or angle-grinder had been applied to the entire right side. I was perfectly fine as I had been wearing full leathers, boots gloves and helmet, and only lost a nickel-sized patch of skin on the heel of my right hand.

My boss (Jon Nelson, RIP you lovely man) took me aside and very kindly gave me two options...buy the bike and parts at his cost, or pay him the extortionate insurance fee that he was going to be hit with when he claimed. I chose the former and fixed the bike back up to mint, and kept it until I realised that all the stories about cam wear and tensioner failure were true.

Turns out that the braking power from two big discs and two-piston callipers on the 750 were much, much greater than the single inboard disc on my VF400F.

 

Two more good ones!!

 

There's surely a Batman on Robin joke in there somewhere.

 

That's BAT-SHIT crazy.

 

"Quick Robin!! To the the Bat Shit Cycle!!"

 

Part of a book I'm writing:

Leap of faith: Squirrel in my lap-don’t panic and stay focused

Just the same as in real life, panicking is rarely a good thing. It detracts from the ability to do what needs to be done. When your ship is sinking, is it more useful to scream and clutch the other passengers or to find something that floats and hold onto it tightly?


Very strange things can happen to a motorcyclist. These strange things seem to require a creative mind for the proper solutions. I once had a person in front of me stop short and pull to the right blocking my escape route. Joe, my instructor from MSF, told us to always have at least one escape route. In this case, the sidewalk was open.


Just as I had been taught, I had scanned the surrounding area for places I could go safely if my normal path was somehow made unusable. I braked hard at first to slow my rate of travel, then quickly counter steered onto the sidewalk, missed the telephone pole, and returned to the road ahead of the stopped car, unscathed.


This was an exciting moment but not as uncommon as my other favorite “don’t panic” story. While driving north east on Franklin Street toward the local soft serve ice cream shop a squirrel jumped out of a tree onto my lap. Remember, don’t panic. It was just a squirrel and it is probably just as taken aback and briefly disoriented as I was.



Figure 9 Squirrel goal. Pic thanks to Al Gore's Internet.


Under these circumstances, it would not be difficult to be distracted and hit the brakes, go straight into oncoming traffic at the next bend, or simply jump off and let the squirrel run the controls. None of these choices would be very good for you, or the squirrel.


Instead, eyes stayed on the road, I slowed down quite a bit so the little creature could bail when it felt it was safe to do so, and waited. It got only a brief ride and went on its way. This could have been ugly without training and a cool head. I was trained for things like this, if not squirrel-specific training.

 

^jeez, squirrel man would have a kaniption fit reading that.

I hit a deer in NJ with my 1993 750 Nighthawk, could not see it until I was maybe 20 yards? Dark would be an understatement (North NJ) locked brakes skiding towards said deer. Nailed him with my knee! Bullseye, deer had blood coming out of its arse and it looked liked he rear leg was broken. I literally hit him and rode past him, I stayed up, I had to process the situation, "Like what the FU*k just happened." I did a u turn, saw said animal hobbling away and I rode home. I was wearing an Aerostich suit, my knee was not bruised or the suit marred, the fairing stay that attached to the fork legs (Memphis Shades windscreen) busted, course deer hair was stuck in my Chase Harper throw over saddle bags.

What I learned from this, is that you can really not go on spirited rides in the county at night in NJ as there a shit-load of deers all over. I am Bat-Shit Crazy btw

 

Not too long ago I had a medium sized bird, maybe a Bluejay, fly out in front of the VFR. It turned directly in front of the bike and was now heading the same direction I was. Of course the bike was gaining so it attempted to climb altitude and struck me square middle of the helmet visor. Wings spread and I couldn't see anything for
2 seconds. It slid off my helmet and I felt it land motionless on my right thigh up against the gas tank. I did a little half stand leg shake thing and the poor bird rolled off the bike.

More recently I took a small blackbird to the sternum at 55 mph. It felt like someone had tossed a football at me. This one didn't stick around.

 

I was following a good friend on his then-new GPz900R and his bike was intercepted by a blackbird (the feathery one, not a CBR1100XX) which hit somewhere between the fender and underside of the fairing. He pulled off to the roadside quickly as the bird had exploded on impact and bird guts had been blown up inside his helmet.