James Whitham's Fizzy Rascals

Revisiting Whitham's trip to Spa on a Fizzy

If you’ve been a reader of the mag for any length of time you can’t have failed to notice that as well as my love of modern bikes, I have an unhealthy interest in older ones. Particularly 1970’s two-stroke stuff. Every year me and a bunch of similarly afflicted mates will wobble off on at least one ill-advised run aboard an assortment of smokey old LC‘s,  X7‘s and GT‘s in an attempt to re-live our youth and double our carbon footprint. 

A couple of years ago we did a 400 mile, 3 day tour of the North on ‘70s mopeds. Despite the fact that up some of the hills we were moving slower than the cattle grazing in the fields at the side of the road, and despite the fact that even on the flat, with your chin on the tank, your left hand on the fork leg and a tail-wind, 50 mph is all you can hope for, we were all surprised how much ground you can cover on ’em if you keep going. Another shock was how much we all enjoyed trying to coax the best out of these thirty year-old little two-strokes.

Consequently, after several beers one night, someone amongst us suggested we get a little bit more adventurous this year. Then, after more ale someone else came up with the idea of riding the mopeds out to the Spa circuit (that’s Spa in Belgium not Boston Spa) for the annual bikers classic meeting, the biggest gathering of classic racing bikes in Europe. As soon as we started to tell people of our scheme they’d laugh so hard their nuts would fall off. Well, apart from any women of course, they just laughed very hard until they wee’d. It then became a point of honour to make it happen.

I’d managed to then heap a whole load more pressure on us to get there at all costs by agreeing to take part in the legends’ parade around the sublime Francochamps Circuit when, or indeed if, we arrived. A couple of tasty, and very rare old GP race bikes were set aside for me to ride, one being a 1989 ex-Randy Mamola 500 Cagiva and the other an ’83 ex-Wayne Gardner RS500 Honda. Iconic bikes that you can normally only dream about riding. Oh, and both priceless...

The plan was as simple as it was ambitious, we’d set off from Huddersfield on the Thursday morning and head for Hull, where we’d take the overnight ferry to Zeebrugge riding on to Spa during Friday, spend all weekend watching, and for me riding some even noisier, smellier, and rarer old strokers  round the track and then re-trace our steps arriving home Tuesday in time for tea and crumpets.

Bearing in mind that these simple devices were designed to carry scrawny, acne ridden 16 year-olds as far as the nearest chip shop or school disco, we figured if we burdened these little bikes with luggage as well as our amply nourished, middle-aged bodies  most of ’em wouldn’t have actually moved at all, so we had a dedicated accomplice, Gav, follow us in a van. This allowed us to take assorted spares and several tubes of pile cream that we’d inevitably need as well as enabling us to bring back any dead bikes that didn’t go the distance.

The seven ’ped pilots were bike shop owning brothers Jamie and Jason riding a Suzuki TS50 and an AC50 respectively, their cousin Marcus on a Kriedler “Floret”, publican Mike on a Suzuki AS50, Boff on an AP50, and Steve, like me, on a Fizzie. The youngest bike being 30 years old and the oldest 38.

So, in a blue haze of 2 stroke smoke and to the rattle of “piston slap” we crawled at full speed away from the Earnshaws Motorcycles car park bound for the north’s capital of...err, fish. Hull.

Just two (yes, that’s two) miles into a round trip of over six hundred we had our first mechanical failure, when a foot long piece of Steve’s FS1-E silencer broke off and went bouncing down the road. Even the most pessimistic estimates of our sceptics had us getting a bit further than this before big stuff started dropping off the bikes. In itself it wasn’t a big problem, we had a spare in the van and had it fitted in 10 minutes, but if this had set the tone for the whole trip we wouldn’t make the boat, and if we didn’t make the boat there would be no way we could get to Spa in time for me to ride the race bikes.

The technique to getting from A to B as quickly as possible on these things is totally different to the way you ride any modern bike. These days you get used to having so much excess power at your disposal, the bike’ll go pretty much as fast as you want, and in most cases a lot faster, so you spend most of your time looking for cameras and trying to stay within the speed limits. With a 4bhp ‘sports moped’ (I never did understand that term) how you ride it makes a huge difference to how fast it’ll go. On a flat road sat upright the fizzer would do 40mph, if you put your feet on the rear pegs and your chin-piece on the tank you could get 47mph, and if you could get in the slipstream of something the speedo would show anything up to 55mph, obviously depending on what vehicle you were stuck up the arse of. Speed limits aren’t so much of a problem, we slowed down for the villages but most of the route to Hull was on A roads with a 60 limit. These wouldn’t do 60 if you hurled them off a cliff!

Two or three mopeds will always go quicker than a single one by helping each other with moving the air. Any cyclist knows the benefits of being in a group and sharing the work. Once you dropped more than about ten yards behind our little ‘peleton’ you could feel the revs dropping and the bike slowing down. After that no matter how tucked in you got or how much you stretched the throttle cable, all you could do was watch as the group inched away.

If you do have to slow right down or stop, you know it’ll take you a week to build your speed up again, so you try and keep moving if you can. You get adept at timing any traffic lights you come across so they change just as you get to them, and second guessing where the traffic around you is going to go. No kidding, you have to work hard on these puny machines, and that’s the fun !

After the false start with the broken exhaust none of the bikes missed a beat on the rest of the run to Hull, the only stops were to gas up a couple of times and occasionally look at the map to make sure we were going the right way. The last five miles to the ferry terminal (that’s 20 minutes on these things )  we rode through a thunderstorm of biblical proportions, and arrived at check-in looking like drowned rats, and with tickets resembling pulp, but on time, and with a real sense of achievement.

We disembarked the next morning with thick heads, but in perfect weather, tanked the bikes up and headed off south-east. Marcus had spent a fair amount of time planning a route across Belgium avoiding motorways. He’d gone to the bother of constructing a huge map (almost actual size) with his whole intended route to Spa highlighted. We soon discovered a couple of flaws in his plan. Firstly, once you get off the “E” roads (our motorways) and the “N” roads (our A roads) you end up on cart-tracks full of local people driving at 20kph. And secondly the road signs are so bad it’s virtually impossible to know where you’re going at all.

After two hours of going round in circles somewhere in the Western part of Belgium we’d covered about two inches of the map, and not much more than that in actual distance. At this rate it would take us a month to get to Spa. We decided on bold action, we’d get on the motorway and take our chances, with the fast traffic and with the rozzers.  If we got pulled we have to talk our way out of it, there would be little chance of us out-running ‘em, or anybody else for that matter.

Most trucks these days are limited to 90kph, or about 56 mph, and once on the motorway we found ourselves being sucked right along with them. The problem with this is that you’re forcing the bikes to rev far harder and more importantly, for far longer than they ever would on their own. Compound this with the lack of cooling air going over the cylinder because you’re in a constant slipstream and the motors get hotter and hotter until something has to give. After about 40 miles of this relentless  punishment, Mike’s AS50 seized.

On most bikes, especially four strokes and multi-cylinder stuff a seizure would signal the end of your trip, and possibly the end of the bike. But on the two stroke single-pot peds a heat seizure isn’t the end of the world. In most cases you simply wait for the motor to cool down a bit, use a spanner to take off the head and cylinder, clean off any aluminium from the iron bore with some wet and dry, put it back together and you’re good to go.  We lost a little bit of skin and less than fifteen minutes.

We came to the conclusion that as well as being illegal, staying on the motorways would, most likely, destroy the bikes, so for the rest of the route we stuck to mostly main roads. After another seven hours in the saddle, two more seizures, a puncture, and a broken chain, all of which were fixed by the side of the road with the skill and urgency displayed by an F1 pit-crew (but without the silly suits)  we rode triumphantly down the main street of Spa as the sun set behind the trees.

Eleven hours of riding. My arse felt like it’d been on fire and put out with a flail but as we sat round a table outside the hotel, each with a Belgian beer, none of us could help having a grin on our faces as we talked about the trip.

We rode up to the circuit the next day and the lads had a wander round while I went to sign on and find my precious steeds. For geeks, err, that’s enthusiasts like us, it was heaven. Think of any bike that’s graced a racetrack in the last 40 years and you’d find a pristine example of one in the paddock being warmed up or lovingly tinkered with by someone who was more than happy to tell you about every nut, bolt and bracket. Some of them were so intense and passionate about their old contraptions they made us feel almost normal.

And the old legends that were there !  We’d walk up the pit lane and pass people like Freddie Spencer, Randy Mamola, Wil Hartog, Steve Baker, Carlos Lavado and John Surtees. I even got to share a garage with two of my childhood hero’s, Graham Crosby and Kork Ballington, it was a surreal experience for me to be hanging about with riders whose posters hung on my wall as a kid. I found it hard not to act like the excitable child I was then.

The Francochamps Circuit was the most iconic thing for me, in a weekend full of icons. I raced here once in 1985 on a 125cc MBA and the only thing I remember was how fast it was. It still is !  The longer version of the track that was used until 1978 had the fastest lap speed of any circuit in the world. Sheene lapped it on an RG500 at an average of 137mph...30 years ago!

I would love to tell you what the two bikes I’d gone to ride were like. How their engines felt, how they steered, how they stopped...but I can’t, because that’s exactly what they did...they stopped! The Cagiva had an ignition fault and the Honda did three laps before its crank went.

That’s the problem. One-off factory bikes like these were hard enough to keep running properly when they were new, with 20 expert technicians throwing parts at them. To bring them out of retirement twice a year, put some fuel in, and expect them to run perfectly is a lot to ask. Putting the right jets in the carbs to suit the conditions is an art in itself.

But you know what ? It didn’t matter, I’d have loved to have done a few more laps, but for the lads and me to successfully coax seven 30 year-old mopeds half way across Europe and to hang around for the weekend with blokes who in their day were the fastest riders on the planet made it more than a good trip. Even if I’d have had to peddle the fizzer all the way home it’d still have been worth it.

Chris Wilson - GP collector

I’ve been collecting bikes since the age of 14 and now have just under 40. I started collecting factory GP race bikes in 1996 and have 14 of them. Keeping them running costs a lot of money, people do help me out here and there but it’s a very expensive hobby, there’s no denying it.

My Cagiva is a V589 1989 ex-Randy Mamola 500cc GP bike designed by Massimo Tamburini. It never won a GP as it wasn’t quite competitive enough, but came close a few times and it was the year that Randy became the paddock clown, as he spent half the time sliding in and out of corners. I went down to the factory and spoke to Claudio Castiglioni who took pity on me and said that it would be too complicated for me to rebuild myself. Cagiva took away my box of bits (only 80% complete) and gave me back a running bike. Not only that, they lent me the very last John Koscinski bike until my re-build was ready. I don’t know what it’s worth because I don’t sell, but I do know that Cagiva’s have been put on eBay at £85k.

My XR88 Suzuki is an ex-Nobuatsu Aoki 500cc four which was used in the all Japan Championship as well as the Japanese GP. I was at Goodwood recently and Yukio Kagayama came up to me and said that it was also his team’s test bike that was used in some races. He then sat and played on it like a kid.

I don’t do track days but am arranging to take half a dozen bikes to one this year to let my mates who have helped me out with the bikes have a go. It’s my way of saying thanks.

Thank you to Chris Wilson for the loan of his immaculate bikes and to all my biking heros for turning up and making the event so special. if you want to go next year check out www.spa-francorchamps.be its more than worth the ride, even on ‘70s mopeds!