by Paul Carter
The rain really kicked in as the convoy drove away from Tailem Bend—Diego and I had to stop to get our wet weather gear on and, despite his heated grips, his hands were so frozen I lent him my racing gloves—but it gave way to sunshine as we threaded through the rolling green hills, passed Pinnaroo and crossed over the border of South Australia and into Victoria. I tried not to think about my dad, or leaving my own remains scattered over a bit of Corowa Airport’s main runway the next day.
Another fuel stop and phone call to Howard and Simon. The news wasn’t good: Simon had turned back, but Howard was pushing on. Howard is a great rider, albeit somewhat mental. A few years ago he was out alone on a quiet country back road on a Sunday morning; always curious about what’s over the next crest or round the next corner, honing his skills, finding that sweet spot when it all falls into place, he rode along in a trance—so far that he actually crossed the state border—and eventually came undone on the way home and stacked, though he walked away without a scratch. I saw his helmet sitting in the corner of his garage, the entire front half was ground away as he slid down the road on his face.
So anyway, Howard is capable of seriously hard riding and I could hear a storm in the background as he yelled excitedly into the phone. ‘I’ve never ridden in rain like this, mate. I’m at a truck stop in Murwillumbah, had to stop, the vis is, like, 30 feet, and there’s so much water on the road my bike’s aquaplaning . . .’
‘Fuck that!’ I tried to tell him not to push it, that it wasn’t worth the risk.
‘Bollocks, I’ll see you in Corowa,’ and with that he hung up.
Brendan was out of reach with no mobile reception so I left a couple of messages. I could only hope he would make it; without his talent there would be no decent photos.
Colin and Ed had been on their iPhones. ‘Call Howard back and tell him to stop and turn around,’ Colin said. There was major flooding all around the area he was about to try to ride through. But of course Howard wasn’t answering. I pictured him atop his heavily laden Buell, tucked in behind the fairing getting pummelled, and felt awful.
Especially because we were now travelling in perfectly balmy, sunny weather and really starting to enjoy the ride. At one point I pulled over and Colin hopped on my bike for a bit, then Ed had a go, then I jumped on Diego’s bike and he on mine. His bike is everything you would expect for an uber-engineered German motorcycle—quiet, reliable, very comfortable, plenty of power, whether you’re on a freeway or up a mountain. It’s shaft-driven with an ingenious rear-swing arm system and an equally clever adjustable suspension and steering dampening design that can be altered without the use of tools. It’s got huge luggage panniers that can be collapsed or expanded in seconds to house everything from a pair of socks to the kitchen sink, heated grips and seat so your hands and botty are always snug, a front fairing that deflects the wind and rain away from the rider, and mounting brackets for your GPS, iPhone and bike-to-bike comms system. It tells you how far it can travel on the remaining fuel, what your average fuel consumption is, how the engine is doing, how the oil is feeling, if the tyres are pumped to be here today. It will call ahead, introducing itself as Günter from Dusseldorf, book your dinner table not too close to the toilets and facilitate your hotel reservations, making sure the turndown maid leaves a rose on the pillow next to a card that will of course read ‘Love always, Günter’.
My Harley does none of those things. It hurls the riding experience in your face and through your body like a backhander from an angry 6-foot chain-smoking Milwaukee kickboxer. But that’s why I love it so much: it’s unsophisticated, uncomplicated and a joy to ride.
We had a ball swapping vehicles over the next few hours, but the best part for me was seeing the facial expressions of the guys as they climbed off my bike. Compared to the loving backward glance always delivered to Diego’s BMW, the reaction on dismounting my bike was more akin to one of pensioners who just got off a rollercoaster and are relieved they didn’t soil themselves.
‘Oh bloody hell, that was fun,’ said Colin, ‘but I’ve had enough.’ He handed me back my open-face helmet that just intensifies the experience.
By mid-afternoon we were in Piangil on the Victorian and New South Wales border, drinking coffee and going through the routine of fuelling up, peeing and making phone calls. Howard picked up; he sounded deflated and was holed up in a motel room in Ballina. ‘Sorry, man, I’m not gonna make it. It’s too full-on.’
I could tell he was a bit pissed off with himself at the realisation he was riding beyond his internal safety warning system. This system is genetically hardwired into a man’s brain box and turns itself on when we have kids; it only goes off when it senses near-death situations that don’t involve protecting your wife and kids. No doubt Howard’s had gone off in his head while he was sliding his Buell sideways down a flooded road in a thunderstorm.
Howard had already made a massive effort to be there last year when we ran the bike at Tailem Bend after Speed Week was cancelled, and this time he had loaded up his bike with 50 pounds of kit and ridden flat-out at the drop of a hat in the worst conditions imaginable to try to be there again. While I appreciated every effort, I was relieved that he’d made the wise choice.
‘I really wanted to go round Tassie and hit it hard,’ he said.
There was a pause while I paced circles in the sunshine trying to think of something positive to say. ‘Next time, mate. Get home safe and kiss those girls for me.’
‘Yeah, and you get that record this time,’ he replied, then signed off for a quiet beer and restful rain-free slumber.
THE
SPEED-CUBED
LAW OF DRAG
WE HAD STOPPED by the side of the road somewhere between Kyalite and Moulamein as the late afternoon sun chased dust past us, kicked up by a small convoy of cars pulling up alongside. The driver of the lead car walked over and asked where we were going. Luckily for us he explained that the road we were heading for was closed off. ‘She’s all shut down, mate, totally flooded.’ It seemed surreal that this was happening only an hour away.
We pulled out the map and planned the shortest route to vector around the flooded areas. For the next two hours we skirted the water, staying on the New South Wales side of the border and following the intact banks of the Edward River. The weather stayed warm and still as our convoy gently cruised along quiet back roads through small towns off the grid. The final run into Corowa was a sudden bombardment of insects. The nearby flooding had created a lot more stagnant water than usual so with the sun setting a billion mozzies came out.We had to stop every ten minutes to wipe off several hundred bugs that had smashed into Diego’s visor and my face (not one of the joys of a open-faced helmet).
About seven that night we swung into the motel car park, and Diego and I climbed off our bikes, the end of a thirteen-hour ride covering 900 kilometres. Brendan our photographer and Doug our speed data logger were there with beers in their hands; it was a relief to see them, because without their presence we were wasting our time. Everyone smashed down a cold beer then had a shower and it was off to the pub.
Corowa is a quaint town nestled against a bend in the Murray River. Its streets are lined densely with old trees while historic timber-clad buildings lean laconically in one direction or other. The quiet walk to the pub gave me time to think about tomorrow’s high-speed run; that eucalypt fragrance so prevalent in the country filled me with optimistic anticipation.
Colin and I were no longer just two guys in a bar planning to go fast on a bike, we had morphed into a team—designers and builders of an outstanding motorcycle and everything that encompasses. But now we had to put it to the test, against the implacable speed-cubed law of drag. If you’re male, you will understand the quest for more speed—as pointless an exercise as it may, perhaps, be perceived. All known barriers need to be pushed—whether it’s a land-speed record at age 40 or peeing highest up the wall in the school urinal at age eight, it’s just the way it is.
In
a corner of the pub we talked through the plan, the mood strangely subdued yet charged with excitement. Doug filled us in on what he’d been doing, a massive amount of work. All the various permissions had come in from the airport, council and army. The risk assessment, safety action plan, insurance and airport active radio divert plan were done. We had the runway to ourselves for the hour between 8 and 9 a.m., every box was ticked and the green light was on. ‘Sun-up is 6.50 a.m.,’ Doug said and went back to his Thai green curry.
Brendan was sitting next to me. ‘I’ve got all my gear ready to go, mate, and the weather forecast is perfect.’
‘The main runway is 1887 metres long, 45 metres wide, level asphalt oriented 050/230 degrees magnetic, and has a 200-metre run-off in every direction.’ Doug’s one of those hyper-accurate guys, it’s just his nature, which is great because accuracy is what he does for a living. As I’ve mentioned he’s also a pilot, and flew his own aircraft up to Corowa from his home. There was a pause as he picked up his glass of wine and downed the remains. ‘So that’s it, it’s all up to you now, Paul.’ He raised his glass at me and sat back in his chair.
‘Don’t come off,’ Colin added with a grin.
We all turned in early; luckily I was exhausted from the ride and just passed out. Until my alarm clock went off like a howitzer; one by one I could hear the other guys’ alarms going off in the thin-walled motel. ‘This is it then,’ I said to myself.
I stumbled into the shower then out into a glorious sunrise. Colin and Rob were hassling Ed in his room, Brendan was loading his camera gear into his car, Doug was on the phone and Diego was standing at the back of the bike trailer scratching his head.
‘Pol, dis bike ees huge,’ he said as I wandered over. ‘It weel be too heavy for your record, no?’
I shrugged. ‘We’re going to find out in a couple of hours, mate.’
He held up one of my armoured racing gloves. ‘Pol, I am so sorry, but I have lost the other glove.’
‘No worries, mate,’ I said. I was in a weirdly calm state, but by breakfast time a few minutes later my stomach was in a knot. I wasn’t game to eat anything after my last experience with the curry when I nearly gassed myself with my own fart and crashed the bike. So I watched the boys eat their breakfast and tried to clear my mind.
‘What’s up, champ?’ Colin slapped me on the back when we were out in the car park.
I held up the thin leather gloves I’d found to replace the armoured racing ones; I really wished I’d brought along an extra pair.
‘Oh,’ Colin said and nodded. ‘Don’t worry about it, mate. Believe me, if you come off, gloves are the last of your problems. Right, let’s get coffee.’
I rode my bike to the airport. The place was perfect, sunny, no wind and a dead-flat, dead-straight runway. We set about marking out the safe braking point with orange traffic cones; Doug prepared his speed data logging equipment and talked to the airport officials and the army parachute display team who were also going through their gear; Brendan set up his camera next to the runway. Diego, Rob, Colin and Ed pushed the BDM-SLS out into the sunshine and checked through all the pre-ride procedures before fuelling her up with Linc Energy’s Clean Diesel, while I went up and down the runway on my Harley noting where the slightest undulations were and finding the best line.
Doug waved me over to his spot, set up so he could see everything. ‘Okay, there’s no air traffic, the army lads are fine, it’s 15.8 degrees Celsius, the relative humidity is 79 per cent, there’s no wind, the sky is clear, it’s not raining, speed data gear is fine. Off you go then.’ He smiled, I nodded, pulled down my visor and rode away for a couple of runs on the track. My 1200 Sportster easily eclipsed the required speed and it’s by no means a sports bike. Trying to get the BDM-SLS to do the same suddenly looked impossible.
Eight a.m. on the button, I was ready, leathers squeaking as I walked up to the bike; it was just me and her now. Colin, Ed, Diego and Rob were in the V8 Holden Commodore ready to pace me down the runway. She sat right in the middle behind the ‘hold lines’, which looks like giant pedestrian crossing, her back wheel right on the edge of the grass. I climbed on. To my right the airport windsock was lifeless, the sun behind me heating up my back. I plugged in the emergency cut-off switch connected to my wrist, hit the fuel pump and cooling system toggles and pressed the engine start switch. The small flat touch-screen monitor which governs the engine management system blinked to life.
‘Calm yourself,’ I said as I pushed her half tone over on the balance point and toed in the kickstand. Clutch in, there was that nice solid ‘thunk’ into first gear, gentle revs and I pulled forward to brake and pause in front of the hold lines. It was a weird moment, just like an aircraft would pause before starting a take-off run.
Twisting my head round, I saw the boys were about 5 metres behind me to my far left, Colin revving the car engine and giving me the thumbs-up. There was none of that familiar cooking-oil hungry smoke from Linc’s Clean Diesel; there was no smoke at all.
‘Ride it like you stole it,’ was the last thing Ed said to me.
I flipped down my visor and just hammered it as hard as I could. As she leapt through the gearbox redlining the gear changes, I held the throttle fully open the whole time and all too soon I was reaching the point where brakes would have been applied at Tailem Bend and it would have been over at 170 kph. But this time I had more blacktop in front of me. In fourth gear I glanced down, passing 190 kph and still pulling hard as the engine started to shriek under me, vibrations reaching a crescendo as the perimeter of the runway flickered past in a sickening blur. Her revs hit the redline again and another glance down: 200 kph. She was deafening me with noise from the darker reaches of Hades, her vibrations not letting me focus my eyes on the instruments. My peripheral vision liquefied, orange cone, orange cone . . . I had two more seconds on full throttle before I had to brake.
The fear, the very real moment when I reached the braking point and passed it, tore through my mind like acid; my stomach, groin and brain had turned into stone and I could feel my heart pounding on my leathers. Then it went calm, built up to the point where speed, vibration and pressure reached a bizarre balance and for a second we were just flying on air. I was laying over the bike cocooned inside the massive front fairing, wide-eyed and high as a kite, as the end of the runway hurtled towards me at somewhere over 200 kilometres per hour.
Brake! said the voice in my helmet. She dipped down hard, the front forks bottoming out as I squeezed both front and back brakes harder and harder while the end of the runway’s hold lines streaked past under my face, which was now doing Edward Munch’s ‘The Scream’ as I desperately tried to stop the bike before we hit the end.
We stopped right on the edge.
My hands slowly unlocked from the bars as smoke drifted up past the front wheel from the completely cooked brakes. The Holden pulled up next to me with three excited faces inside and Colin, who was hyper, leaning out of the open driver’s window. ‘We couldn’t keep up, mate!’ he yelled. ‘I had my foot buried in the fire wall, and we couldn’t keep up.’
‘I think my brakes are fucked,’ was all I could say. I was shaking, stalling the engine when I tried to turn around.
While Ed and Rob worked on the brakes, Doug checked on the speed data logger. He had clocked the run at 205.48 kph; the record was 210.203 kph. So close.
‘Did you get it into fifth gear?’ Colin asked as I pulled off my helmet.
‘No, mate, I just wound her up to redline in fourth.’
He scratched his chin. ‘Try fifth,’ he said. ‘Although you will lose some revs.’
For the next fifteen minutes we all worked on the bike feverishly, conversations as fast as the tools being passed around. All the bugs had been ironed out for this attempt on the short runway; the frame, the rake and tail on the steering angles, the fuel management system, cooling system, drive and rear wheel sprockets, all finetuned around the aim of getting a bike this size down an airport runway as fast
as possible and stopping it before the end. This was remarkable when you consider the bike was never designed to be constrained in this way. She was never meant to have massive brakes for stopping hard on the blacktop, but small light brakes to slowly reduce speed on a loose dry salt lake. She could achieve so much on the salt; constraining her was like putting a weight belt on a ballerina.
We went at it again, and at the same point as she shuddered into the calm fourth-gear redline I popped her into fifth, but only for a few seconds, not enough to make a difference. For the next half an hour I went up and down that runway, winding out in fourth, hitting an unfortunate parrot that exploded, popping her into fifth, but we never got close to the speed of that first run. At one stage Doug had to wave me off the runway so a bloke in a light aircraft could land, so we used the time to drain out the Clean Diesel and refuel with bio-diesel. It made no difference at all in the way the bike performed. We tweaked the engine management system; I tried to brake a second later every time, until I was riding off the end of the runway.
We didn’t get there in the end, though we got very close. If only we had the chance to see what this bike could do on 16 kilometres of dry salt lake, with the proper DLRA track, officials, Federation Internationale Motorcycle timing gear and everything that makes Speed Week a world-class event. For now, Corowa’s 2-kilometre main runway was all we had, and it was over. Frustrating does not begin to describe it. I was accelerating at a rate of 2 kilometres per hour per second; all I needed was another three or four seconds.
IF YOU DON’T BELONG,
DON’T BE LONG
