The Irish Tales

The Long Road Back, to Assen. (Part three)


Without a shadow of a doubt, someone was watching over The Crow and I that weekend.
During the most intensive 48 hours I can remember, we both enjoyed moments of extreme peril, only to escape with a single, improbable bound.
Deux ex machina ? You’d think so, were this a fictional story.
Read on and see what you think, my anonymous friends.

Let’s start with the weather : both days, the ride to and from the track was through rain and sleet, which ended abruptly at the entrance to the track, where it was sunny and dry. Odd.

Then there was the coincidence of Doc Bush Racing being there as well.
They had exclusive use of a pitlane garage and we sort of camped out with them. Forget the oil-stained, leaking garages of Donny or Brands.
This was pristine clean, had its own private shower room and loo and the help of Walt, (I think that was his name), Doc’s private spannerman and all-round good egg.

Just as well, really, because it was clear that The Crow was having problems. His foot was infected and extremely painful.
It should have occurred to me earlier that Doc Bush was the man to talk to, but I was having too much fun on the banked corners to think about anything else.
The trick with them was to keep the throttle pinned, otherwise gravity would take over and down you’d go, as a couple of riders did, right in front of me.
Oh how I started to love them as my confidence grew; both in myself and the wonderful Ducati.

Then I watched Nigel pull up in obvious pain, barely able to set his foot down on the ground.
Enter Doc Bush. He glanced briefly at the foot, then marched Nigel off to the medics, where he announced who he was and what his medical credentials were and then blagged all kinds of cool antibiotics from the M.O.
It’s good to have friends in high and low places, you know.

Whilst The Crow went off to a nearby hospital to have his foot cleansed and bandaged, I renewed my love affair with Assen.
By now, I was beginning to feel immortal and this was only enhanced by the following incident.
I was tracking two riders down a straight which led to a chicane, where the track narrowed by half.
Both seemed unaware of the other and as the track narrowed, they moved closer and closer together, until the inevitable happened – they collided at roughly 100mph, right in front of me.
There was no time to take avoiding action, I simply closed my eyes and headed straight on, hoping for the best.
I was spattered with bits of exploding plastic fairing, shards of metal and some blood.
Then I emerged on the other side with the huge grin of the survivor.

(When I finally got home, I found an inch long piece of metal impaled in my leathers, just two inches from the jugular. I was always lucky at cards.)

Now…..
Have you noticed that whenever you get to feeling you might be someone special, something happens to puncture your hubris ?
I was hurtling ( or so I thought) down the short straight before the chicane which leads to the start/finish line, when I was overtaken by a guy on Suzuki GSXR 750.
Nothing odd there; I was overtaken by many bikes during the weekend.
What nearly made me fall off with shock was that the rider only had one arm – his right.

I followed him into pitlane and chatted to him.
He’d lost the arm in a bike accident and once recovered, he immediately had his bike converted so that the right bar held the throttle and clutch, with a thumb lever for the front brake.
I was humbled. Nice lad, too. Younger than me, of course. The bastard.

And then The Crow returned, noticably perked up and ready to rock.
Except, for some reason, his standard road exhaust set off the marshall’s decibel alert and he was black-flagged. Oh how I smirked !

Towards the end of the second day, I began to flag myself. Wonderful as it had been, I knew that my concentration was going and I was tempting fate to carry on.
Just for fun, I did a few more laps, but at cruising speed, attempting to fix the entire track in my memory. (Waste of time; two years or so later they rebuilt almost all of the track, including my beloved banked corners. Hey ho.)

I pulled in, thinking of a leisurely ride back to the Hook and the midnight ferry home.
No such luck; you see, there was a football game that night – England against Germany, in Germany……….
　
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To be concluded. Then no more bike columns. Maybe.