Motorcycle Quote of the Day

[Biggles]

A few years back I got young British hopeful Jamie Robinson a ride with Team Roberts in the Spanish Open series at Calafat, a few hours south of Barcelona. His TZ250 seized flat out in fifth and flicked him into a rocky run-off area. He was badly battered and one of his fingers swelled up purple, he was in agony. So Sandy Rainey (Wayne's dad and the team's mechanic) says: "Son, you gotta relieve the pressure"; he grabs a Black & Decker and drills through the fingernail until blood gushes out. Trying hard to look cool, I tell Jamie: "Better get down the medical centre and get that sterilised."
"Hell no," barks Sandy. "Stick it in some gasoline, that'll fix it up." So Jamie did, then went out, led the race... and fell off again.
Then there's American Superbike racer Dale 'Cut it Off Surgeon Quarterly', who wrecked a finger some years back at a US meet. Surgeons gave him a choice: "We can fix the finger and you'll be racing in three months or we can cut it off and you can race next Sunday." No choice for a racer.
The Fast Stuff  Mat Oxley  p74

[Biggles]

Michelin, who have dominated 500 GP racing for years, spend vast resources on widening that transition phase just as wide as it'll go, because that's what all but a handful of the world's riders need.
"To slide like they do, 500 riders need a huge amount of feel and feedback" explains the firm's racing boss Nicolas Goubert. "They need to sense exactly what the tyre is doing, and from experience, know what it's going to do next. Tyre compound and, to a lesser extent, construction are the crucial factors in offering excellent feedback.
"The more grip a rider has at his disposal the more feel and feedback he needs. What most riders want is a period of warning as they approach the limit. It's no good having massive amounts of grip if the limit is reached without any warning, because the rider won't have the confidence to approach that limit. Most riders will go faster with slightly less grip and more feedback. Only the very best riders can go fastest with a huge amount of grip and minimal feedback, because their skill allows them to cope with less of a transition phase."
The Fast Stuff  Mat Oxley  p96

[Biggles]

The GP paddock can have that effect on you. It's a weird environment, populated by some of the most extreme people you'll ever meet. And not only the riders, everyone at GPs has a hint of the psychotic about them (yeah, I'm including the media in this) because they're ultra-ultra serious about what they're doing. The riders, for starters, have one of the weirdest jobs on earth: flying around the world, employed as mobile advertising hoardings and occasionally hurling themselves into Armco barriers. Their mechanics are no less obsessed with what they do; most of them only get to return home for six weeks in a year. And then there's the team managers, the PR people, the cooks and the gofers, the medics and the media, the hangers-on and the floozies, almost a thousand people in all - and stress monkeys, the lot of them. As Randy Mamola said recently, if a bunch of Martians started monitoring bike racing from space, they'd worry for humanity.
The Fast Stuff  Mat Oxley  p122

[Biggles]

Gerald Davison
"By mid-1980 it was obvious we needed to do something drastic. In Japan I told Irimajiri (NR engineer) that the project was more like a school for engineers than a race team. Half joking, I said he should send the team to a temple and tell them to reflect on what they're trying to do. The very next day he did just that! A fleet of minibuses took us to a Buddhist temple and we took along some bike bits for blessing. We arrived at this beautiful place up a forest-clad mountain, with dancing girls and music. It was pretty spectacular. The Japanese are quite ambivalent about religion. If they're in a fix they go to a temple and say a prayer; you never know, it might work. I had this vision of a new dimension to racing - we'd turn up on the grid with a Buddhist monk, while some Italian team might have a papal representative. I suppose the temple visit might have made the people feel better, because the constant struggle was making some of the engineers closest to the project look ill."
The Fast Stuff  Mat Oxley  p155

[Biggles]

We down our cappuccinos and head outside to discover the 'real' world of MotoGP, pacing alongside the perfectly regimented line of artics parked behind the pits, where the proper stuff goes on. There's 110 articulated lorries here and they all look like they've been parked by an obsessive compulsive with a GPS system. Which is exactly how it works. There's chalk marks on the tarmac to indicate each artic's exact parking position. If only God had been as meticulous when he made the world...
You want a look inside one of the trucks - okay, so we dive inside the Yamaha motorsport artic, parked alongside the two Marlboro Yamaha trucks. This is my favourite, it's one of those expandable artics, which grows six feet wider when parked, and inside it's just a little like being on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise - all computer monitors, coloured lights and earnest Japanese technicians poring over facts and figures, throwing you suspicious looks as you press the entry button and the sliding door schloooks open. Behind the staff is a bank of 12 TV screens, all broadcasting the same Japanese winter scene, snow gently falling to the ground, calming Japanese folk music playing at low volume. Very strange.
The Fast Stuff  Mat Oxley  p177

[Biggles]

Wayne Rainey
I'd gotten a bad start, Schwantz was riding good and was leading. I was thinking: "Man, he's gonna take off!" then I caught him, passed him and pulled out a bit. I was the only guy on Dunlops and my tyres went off a little, so I was able to slow down some, cool the tyres off, drop back to fourth, then make another charge towards the end. Normally you can't do things like that in a race, you're normally flat out all the way I was able to exploit the advantage I had with the tyres, and that's what won me the race. I knew I had a performance advantage with the tyres, just from the way I could manoeuvre the bike, put it in different areas of the corner and kinda intimidate everybody and enjoy that, it was like turning around and sticking your tongue out at them, that's the way I felt. When you can think that way and you're in a world championship race, when there's so much on the line, I was just feeling like a kid. I was thinking: "This is not meant to be this much fun!"
Rainey's Suzuka experience tallies with research by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the man who first investigated flow in the early 1970s. He surmised from thousands of interviews that flow is 'a common subjective experience of pleasure, interest and even ecstasy, derived from activities that perfectly match one's skills with the demands for performance'. Rainey's talents were obviously entirely matched to what he was required to do.
The Fast Stuff  Mat Oxley  pp242-3

[Biggles]

There's not a half-successful racer in the world who doesn't get up to some kind of mischief in his quest for glory (though in researching this story I quickly realised that it's only retired riders who'll talk about this kind of stuff), while the more evil riders commit truly heinous crimes that risk rivals' lives.
There's the standard dirty tricks that everyone does - like gently moving a rival off line when braking into a corner, or easing an opponent away from the grippy line mid-turn. Then there's the nastier tactics - like shutting the throttle halfway through a corner to force someone into taking drastic avoiding action, thus losing them vital time. And then there's the seriously dangerous stuff - like running a rival onto the grass at high speed, or deliberately colliding with them, or hitting their kill switch, or shutting their throttle, or punching or kicking them.
The Fast Stuff  Mat Oxley  p265

[Biggles]

There's an old saying in racing: if you're not crashing, you're not going fast enough. Proof: The last rider to win a world championship without crashing was Sito Pons, who lifted the 1989 250 crown without once overstepping the mark. And here's another racing axiom, from three-time 500 king Wayne Rainey: "If a rider's fast and he's crashing, maybe you can stop him crashing, but if a rider's slow, you're not going to make him fast." In other words, there's no racing without crashing. And if you ever go racing, you'll be crashing too.
Crashes happens because racing is all about being faster than the next guy, which means you've got to bend the laws of physics to your own will and thus exist on the edge of a precipice. It's therefore inevitable that you'll fall over that precipice every now and again.
The Fast Stuff  Mat Oxley  p286

[Biggles]

Valentino Rossi is a man in love with motorcycles. The seven-time world champ is arguably the greatest bike racer in history, but that's not all. While most professional racers shirk road riding, claiming that it's too dangerous, Rossi is a regular on the streets, especially in his home town of London where bikes rule.
The Italian bubbles over with enthusiasm when talking about street riding, just as he does when he talks about riding on the track. So who better to ask for advice about how to get more out of your motorcycle, whether you're riding to work or getting your knee down at a track day?
"I still ride on the road always, I enjoy it but for sure it's not the track," says Rossi. "The problem with the road is it's full of stupids, especially in cars,
and also you never know the grip of the asphalt, so you need to stay a little bit slower than on the track."
Mental focus is everything when you're on a motorcycle, no matter whether you're on the track or the street. 
The Fast Stuff  Mat Oxley  p323

[Biggles]

Kawasaki's early H2 750s were evil pieces of equipment. Their fragile air-cooled motors required riders to focus much of their attention on engine noise, nervously listening warnings of an imminent seizure amongst the cacophony of open spannies. And when the motors were running, they screeched out more power than their flexi frames and iffy tyres could handle.
"Hell, they were scary!" Nixon admits. "But it was just something you had to do. You're a racer, you're out there trying to go faster, and the Triumphs were running 150mph when two-strokes were running 180. That's a big difference. But that Kawasaki would wobble so bad at Daytona that Yvon [DuHamell] told me: "Well, just cut an inch or two off the bars." The thing still wobbled but your hands didn't go so far back and forth.
The Fast Stuff  Mat Oxley  p349

[Biggles]

At least Hunter S Thompson did fully understand the dangers involved in riding bikes too fast. "The final measure of any rider's skill," he wrote in summing up the big red Duke. "Is the inverse ratio of his preferred travelling speed to the number of bad scars on his body." He did nearly crash the v-twin, of course: "I felt nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody heard... This motorcycle is simply too goddam fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you're ready to go straight down the centreline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat." He also found the bike's ergonomics unsuited to his substance-abused body: "I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that got emptied yesterday."
The Fast Stuff  Mat Oxley  p353

[Biggles]

"There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games," said hard-drinking writer Ernest Hemingway. I'm assuming that the original 20th century man's man would've included bikes within motor racing because bike racers are at least as rough 'n' tough as matadors, mountain climbers and motor car racers.
Hemingway's words came to me during MotoGP's long-awaited and much-hyped return to Laguna Seca for the 2005 US GP. Laguna is a scary racetrack, way more dangerous than anywhere else that Rossi and Co ply their trade. It's America's Brands Hatch, plunging up and down like a roller-coaster, a proper Wild West ride in pretty Californian scenery, some of which is way too close for comfort. It's the kind of place where you feel proper awe watching riders do their thing, because you know the consequences of a mistake would be very messy. Winner Nicky Hayden was genuinely awesome to behold through Laguna's notorious Turn One - a 160mph left-hander over the brow of a hill - drifting both wheels at full lean, regardless of the cliff face a few yards away.
The Fast Stuff  Mat Oxley  p375

[Biggles]

In fact Assen is still heavy with history. In between the whiff of chip fat a and weed smoke you can almost taste the sweet old smell of Castrol R. Mike Hailwood won races there, so did Barry Sheane, King Kenny Roberts, Giacomo Agostini, Freddie Spencer, Kevin Schwantz, Mick Doohan and Rossi (Graziano too). There is no other GP track in the world where you can say that because Assen is the sole survivor from GP racing's inaugural 1949 season. But Assen is no longer unique, so even though it's better than some GP tracks, it's only half the place it used to be.
You may wonder why I consider racetracks to be so important, why I get excited rolling up somewhere fast and open like Mugello, Phillip Island and Istanbul, but become strangely depressed when I turn up at mean little layouts like Losail, Motegi and Shanghai. I feel like that because great circuits promote great racing, with riders mugging each other at every other turn, while poor layouts encourage F1-style processions. That's why circuits matter, possibly even more than bikes and riders.
The Fast Stuff  Mat Oxley  p411

[Biggles]

Nick Jeffries
The other one was when I had an experimental gearbox seize on a CBR600 in morning practice. I'd just caught Joey Dunlop going into Greeba Castle and that was the last thing I knew. I was quite poorly from that, lost all the ligaments in me knee from that one, that was an unconscious job.
The third one was when the suspension collapsed on my RC45. It was our fault, we'd modified the shock. The whole back end collapsed before the left hander after Ballacraine. I was off the bike before I got to the bend. That was another airlift [helicopter] job. I lost the ligaments in me other knee, broken toes, broken arm, broken shoulder, I broke quite a few things. But they're not serious injuries compared to what you can have on the Isle of Man at those sorts of speeds. I always got back on again, I didn't want to finish on a low.
The Fast Stuff  Mat Oxley  p443

[Biggles]

The adrenaline rush of a fast TT lap is like nothing else on earth: it's mainlining the greatest drug known to man, your synapses on fire as you burst into a sleepy village at five times the speed limit. No buzz that big comes risk-free.
Obviously, no one who races there is unaware of the enormous dangers they face each time they rocket down Bray Hill, bouncing from gutter to manhole cover, fighting the mother of all tankslappers. Poor old David Jefferies was bang on the money when he gave this upfront assessment of racing on the Island: "You have to be totally at ease with yourself, know exactly what you're doing, and accept that you might be going home in a box."
The TT fascinates racers who should know better. Some years ago Wayne Rainey watched an on-bike TT lap and didn't stop talking about it for days. The former 500 king was genuinely awed by the reality of racing around the streets at 190mph - he couldn't believe it's still allowed to go on.
The Fast Stuff  Mat Oxley  p448

[Biggles]

The TT is a relic from an age when most racetracks were similarly lethal, roped-off public roads. But while dozens of other street venues have been shut down the TT survives because it sits on a self-governed island which is very fond of the millions generated by the races. If anyone else was in charge - Westminster, Brussels - it would be just another piece of bike-racing history.
And perhaps this is where the world and I have changed (please excuse me as I enter Grumpy Old Git mode). It seems to me the world has been taken over by puritan megalomaniacs and I don't like it. These crusading cretins pretend they care about people but they don't, they want us to stop riding motorcycles (why else would they keep tightening the bike test?) and quit smoking, but they start wars. The TT is a wild anachronism in an increasingly controlled society; it's barking at the moon, a big fingers up to those who want us all to lead safe, obedient, mortgaged lives under the all-seeing eye of the CCTV camera, obeying the command of dayglo-clad security gorillas with an IQ of 50 and tranquillised by the government's looped mantra of 'your safety is our primary concern'. Bollocks to the lot of them.
The Fast Stuff  Mat Oxley  p449

[Biggles]

Riders fully rely on the technology to keep them out of trouble. At the start of 2007 I eavesdropped on Stoner debriefing his engineers after practice. The Aussie had been flicked over the highside when he had got too eager with the throttle, and he was angry. "I should never have crashed," he told his crew chief. "The traction control should have taken care of it." So Stoner believed that the electronics should have translated his greedy fistful into exactly the correct amount of power that the rear tyre could handle at that moment. This does take the skill out of riding.
And yet if electronic trickery has stolen something from MotoGP with one hand, it does at least give something back with the other (when the technology works, that is). "These days we start a lot of GPs with full and healthy grids," says Edwards. "In years past I don't know how many times guys like Schwantz, Rainey and Doohan rode with broken arms and legs. The technology definitely makes it safer, so you don't have so much of that ass pucker going on."
The Fast Stuff  Mat Oxley  pp468-9

[Biggles]

When Hell's Angels chapters started getting chartered outside the state of California in the late sixties, that's when we first started our cross-country rides
like the USA and World Runs. We'd meet up with the new clubs along the way, and they'd join the run. Man, we used to ride from Oakland to New York on those early rigid-frame bikes, and they bounced around so much that if you drove sixty miles in an hour you were making great time. They left you tingling and numb for about an hour after you got off your bike. If you covered three or four hundred miles in a day you were hauling ass. The other big problem then was that we'd have to find gas stations every forty miles or so, since those old-style bikes with small tanks couldn't make it past sixty miles. Today, on a Harley FXRT, with their rubber-mounted motors and big gas tanks, you not only get a smoother ride, you can log five or six hundred miles a day on a few tanks of gas without breaking a sweat.
Hell's Angel  Ralph "Sonny" Barger  pp1-2

[Biggles]

In the early sixties, Honda had an ad, "You meet the nicest people on a Honda". That really turned the Hell's Angels off and knocked Harley for a loop with the average consumer. Honda had such tiny bikes, 50cc and 1OOcc bikes, the biggest one being a 450cc. Later, when they started coming out with 900, 1100, and 1200 and even those big 1500cc bikes, man, that's some machinery Harley can't touch. Kawasaki and some of the Japanese sport bikes have better brakes and more horsepower and handle easier.
What Harley has is brute horsepower. A brand-new Harley comes with about forty-nine to fifty-two horsepower to the rear wheel. After I've done a little work on mine, I'll get eighty-one horses to the rear wheel.
Up until 1984, Harley-Davidsons were famous for leaking oil. Even when they were brand-new, they leaked, and dealers had to put pieces of cardboard under them in the showroom. Early Harleys came with oil leaks because the tin primary cases had ineffective cork gaskets around them. Sometimes the motors weren't machined properly. If you didn't start your bike for a week, the oil accumulated through the oil pump and into the crankcase. Once you started it, it spit oil all over the ground. After stricter quality control and extra research and development at the factory, they eventually took care of the problem with the new Evolution motor.   
Hell's Angel  Ralph "Sonny" Barger  pp54-5

[Biggles]

After we lost Charlie Magroo, Sacramento's George, the Hell's Angels became well known for our giant funerals. When a member dies, everybody goes to his funeral.
It's out of respect for the man and his particular charter. Part of it is a show of strength. I've gone to funerals of members I didn't even know, but because they were members, I felt obligated if I could make it.
Law enforcement agencies used to make fun of the Hell's Angel funerals when we would ride our motorcycles alongside the hearse in a mile-long formation. The cops called us a bunch of clowns. But it wasn't too long after that, whenever a cop got killed on duty, they started doing the same exact thing. Now it's common-place, damn near regulation.
Hell's Angel  Ralph "Sonny" Barger  pp79-80

[Biggles]

Hell's Angels love to fistfight. There's never a shortage of drunks or fools willing to take us on, and a lot of times we'll take on each other. Armand Bletcher stood six feet eight and weighed in at 350 pounds. He was so strong he could pick up a couple of motorcycles and put them on the back of a pickup truck. In the early 1970s Armand could bench-press 705 pounds, but he had to arch his back to do it. He was never in competition, but he took steroids and was unbelievably big.
Only Johnny Angel would dare pick a fight with Armand Bletcher. Armand turned to me one day, almost crying, practically begging, "Sonny, please let me fight him."
"Armand," I said, "if you do it, we're all going to have to jump on you."
We would have ended up stabbing him, because there was no way in the world we could have beaten this guy in a fair fight. He probably could have wiped out everybody in the room.
Hell's Angel  Ralph "Sonny" Barger  p87

[Biggles]

Sharon had come a long, long way from the nineteen-year-old ex-Maid of Livermore. One time I was fighting a charge of being felon possessing a firearm, and the gun in question actually belonged to Sharon.
In the courtroom, the U.S. attorney cross-examined me on the stand as he held up a pistol.
"Mr. Barger, is this your gun?"
"No, it belongs to Sharon."
Sharon was in the courtroom, so the prosecutor brought her up on the stand. Holding the gun out to her, the prosecutor asked her, "What do you know about this gun?"
"Well," she said, "one thing, the clip is still in it. Be careful. It might be loaded." The stupid prosecutor nearly dropped the gun handing it to her, but Sharon caught the piece, jacked it back, pumped the clip out, threw the clip back in, and slid the gun back to him.
"Don't worry," she said, "it's not loaded."
The judge grunted and looked down at the prosecutor. "The gun is obviously hers, now get her off the stand."
Hell's Angel  Ralph "Sonny" Barger  pp112-3

[Biggles]

When his time came, he got it. He got beaten up by the Hell's Angels so he could say, "I met them, I rode with them, and I was almost killed by the Hell's Angels."
He got into some really stupid shit to get beat up. First, he'd been away from us for a long time finishing his writing. When his book was done, he asked if he could ride up with us to Squaw Rock for a gun run. While we were there, Junkie George got into an argument with his old lady and slapped her. Hey, it happens. Then George's own dog bit him. Junkie George was so pissed off he kicked the dog too. Hunter S Thompson walked up to George and told him, "Only punks slap their old ladies and kick dogs."
This really pissed George off, so he poleaxed Hunter while a couple of us kicked him around. He was bleeding, broken up, and sobbing, and we told him to get in his car and drive away. He rode to a nearby police station and they told him to clear out too. They didn't want him bleeding in their bathroom.
I read the book, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, when it came out in 1967. It was junk.
Hell's Angel  Ralph "Sonny" Barger  pp126-7

[Biggles]

Around the same time there was another hassle between Oakland and another motorcycle club. We didn't shoot or stab anybody, but anytime we saw any of their members, we'd rough 'em up, then cut their patches off with hunting knives. Snatching somebody else's patch is a serious act of battle. Sometimes they'd give it up out of fear and we'd just throw them away. Originally we would keep them as trophies, but that only created a reason for clubs to raid our clubhouse looking for their patches. If a club caught a Hell's Angel on his own, they would surely do the same thing. Any Hell's Angel forced to give up his patch without fighting for it is automatically voted out of the club.
Hell's Angel  Ralph "Sonny" Barger  p149

[Biggles]

Folsom was the only maximum-security prison in the state at the time. San Quentin, although it was a prison, wasn't a max, though they had other ways of dealing with screw-ups. If you were a troublemaker at Q, they'd keep you inside your cell by welding the door shut. Months later, maybe they'd grind it open.
I mostly hung out with the motorcycle riders in the joint. Out of all the bike riders, the most Hell's Angels that were at Folsom at any one time was five or six of us. Having other Hell's Angels inside helped a lot. You hate to see your brothers inside, and you're glad to see them go home, but it's fun having them there.
We'd see each other every day, except during lockdowns. There was Fu, Marvin, Grubby Glen, Whitey, and me. Doug the Thug was in and out, shipped back and forth from San Quentin. Other bikers like Billy Maggot and Brutus also came from San Quentin. It was called "bus therapy". When there were problems- race hassles, drugs, violence, whatever- in San Quentin, they'd grab everybody and ship 'em out, keeping their actual location in bureaucratic limbo. "Bus therapy" was another name for moving the problem rather than solving it.
Hell's Angel  Ralph "Sonny" Barger  pp193-4