Whoever invented the sidecar? It is a stupid concept when you think about it. You take a well-balanced, light-weight performance machine and attach a dead weight to one side. No wonder that the whole plot swerves violently to one side when you lean on the gas and then veers the other way when you try to stop the wretched contraption. The very idea of racing an outfit has got to be doubly daft and as for racing an MZ outfit.

My involvement in things of a three wheeled nature is due to a friend; John. For a long time John relied on a 500 Triumph solo whilst the rest of us were blowing our hard earned on GPZs and their ilk. After being involved motorcycle/myopic moron in a car scenario, an ex-Police Moto Guzzi was acquired and a black fibre-glass affair with an uncomfortable resemblance to a coffin was nailed to the side. I can’t say that I was convinced by this three wheel activity even then; it’s all a bit too reminiscent of the joke about the Sinclair C5, thus:

‘What is it?’

An invalid carriage’

‘But I’m not an invalid’

‘You havn’t driven it yet!’

So one winter’s evening a couple of years ago, a number of us were sitting around in the pub with John being a bit generous with the brown falling over stuff. The subject eventually got around to motorbikes (must have taken, oh, two or three minutes) and from there to racing, as usual. John had had the perverted idea of building an MZ outfit and racing it. He’d obviously been nurturing the idea for a while. Oh well, game for anything, me. Pissed? Certainly.


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