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OTHER SHIT MOTORBIKE DAYS(2) |
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MOTORBIKE DAYS(1) |
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I left school at seventeen. Thank fuck! What a load of brain-washing, individuality-sapping load of fuckin' crap it was. I got a job as a Psychiatric Asssistant (a fancy name for Nurse Aide) at the local nuthouse, Ngawhatu Hospital. Back then the pay was really good, (before the "new right" swept over the country) and I had money to burn. It all went on cars, stereos, records, video recorders, alcohol, pot, and... motorbikes! My first motorbike was a Yamaha IT175H, a blue two-stroke enduro bike which burned as much oil as Saddam Hussein's oil-rig birthday cake during George Bush Senior's 1990's Gulf war. It was a fuckin' noisy ring ding ding thing too.I had it for about three months, and then traded it in for a newly released Suzuki DR250Z. |
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The DR was a four stoke, which made it better for road use, and it didn't spew out two-stroke smoke from the exhaust pipe either. It was a good bike for the Hira Forest, which I rode a lot. It was a huge forest, which was a trail riders paradise, with miles upon miles of fire-breaks and trails, and you could ride all day without riding the same fire-break or trail twice. It had good Full Floater single shock suspension, one of first four-stroke trail bikes to have it. It was an advanced bike in it's day. I had a wierd accident on this bike. I was on a straight road, it was night-time, and it was raining. A combination of something slippery on the road, and those knobbly tires, saw me off the bike and onto the road. I was going quite fast and I can remember being on my |
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My first DR250Z, early 1983. |
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hands and knees and sliding along the road. It sort of happened in slow motion, and I slid for about fifty metres, and thinking "I'm not going to have much skin on my hands and knees after this". (I wasn't wearing gloves.) When I stopped sliding I was most surprised to find that I didn't have a single mark on me. I had aquaplaned. The DR was a good bike, but I wanted more grunt... |
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So I ended up buying an XL500S, which was the last of the twin-shockers. It was quite grunty (for it's day) but was heavy and handled firebreaks and trails like a piece of shit. It was fun though! It was with this bike that I totally mastered the art of riding on the back wheel, and I could mono that thing for as long as I wanted. One day me and a friend (Dean) were waiting at a red light, on the bottom of Richmonds main drag, when a bikie pulled up beside us and kept blipping his throttle, and when the lights turned green he raced off. Dean tried doing a wheelie past him, but he failed, so I went full throttle and slipped the clutch, bringing my bike up onto the back wheel and went flying past him and continued down the road (which was straight and turned semi-rural) until I got to the end, which was four kilometres. It was the longest wheelie I had ever pulled, and I was on the back wheel for so long that the front wheel had stopped spinning around. When I got back to Richmond, Dean said that the bikie had pulled over and stopped, and just stared. Ha! That'll teach you to piss on my Honda! (Another story) |
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I kept the XL, but bought another bike, a motocrosser. It was a Honda CR250RB, the first of the prolinks and also the first Honda watercooled motocrosser. It had a red engine, and unusually, for a Jappa, the kickstarter was on the left. This bike was fuckin' evil, it was all top end power with nothing down below, and fuck, when the powerband kicked in it was all on. You could bring it up into a wheelie, in top gear, simply by twisting the throttle right round and heaving on the bars. You didn't even have to use the clutch! Me and some friends were virtually convinced that this bike was cursed. Just about everytime I rode it something bad would happen. Even the two people who owned it after me had the same problems. One of the first times I rode it, I was warming it up, with no helmet on, when for some wierd reasonI didn't see this pile of dirt in front of me and I ran straight into it. Me and the bike went flying, and the bike flew over the top of me. I hit the ground hard, on the top of my head, and put a good sized gash on it. It bled heaps! I was a bit woozy too! Another time I was flying along on the back wheel, when all of a sudden the throttle jammed, wide open. I instantly found myself on my arse, with the |
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My CR250RB, the cursed machine, Oct 1983. |
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bike cartwheeling along in front of me. The alloy handle bars snapped into two, the rear mud-gaurd shattered, and the muffler was bent at right angles. One day me and some friends decided to ride the Maungatapu track, the old stagecoach track which went to Pelorus, famous for the Maungatapu murders. We wanted to take our motocrossers, and thought we'd ride them to the track, on the road, as we couldn't be bothered taking them there with a car and trailor. We set off with me and Alex on motocrossers, (Alex had a Yamaha YZ250J) Darryl was on my XL and Dean was on his DR. We just got down the road when the cops pulled us over, (they were always looking out for us lot) and told us we couldn't ride our motocross on the road. Fuck! We had a talk and decided to wait half an hour and try again, and decided that if we ran into the cops again we would just drag them off. They wouldn't have a hope in hell of catching us, and we were insane. Things went really good, went really well, until we were just about in Nelson, cruising down Bishopdale, when we spotted two cop cars coming up behind us. We wound our throttles open and took off. We went flying around some suburban streets at full tit, with these two cop cars after us, lights flashing and sirens wailing. We dragged them off and got to the Maungatapu Track. Once on the track we let loose. I was at the front, went flying around a bend and straight into a Jeep thing with fuckin' big bullbars, coming the other way. I thought, "hospital, here I come, or a new room six feet under". |
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OTHER SHIT MOTORBIKE DAYS(2) |
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