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.
Continue Fizzy Rascals - 2/3
