It didn’t go to plan. Last month, in this column, I wrote that this summer was to be my triumphant return to motorcycle racing. It’s only the end of May, but already I’m having to downgrade triumphant to something less grandiose. If triumphant is sailing through the front doors of a five-star hotel with a bottle of Prosecco held aloft, then my season so far could best be described as sneaking in the service entrance of a low-end hotel with a six-pack of room-temperature Coors Light tucked beneath my arm.
My first problem is mechanical. The desmoquattro in my Ducati is dictating how quickly it will come back together. Despite the diligence of a friend who’s rebuilding it, 30-year-old Italian engines do not just fall together. Sometimes you need an extra shim or two that aren’t in the comprehensive kit of shims I bought. Or there’s an extra gasket or two needed that aren’t in the comprehensive pack of gaskets. For something as seemingly straightforward as a two-piston, eight-valve engine, it’s proving to be anything but straightforward to make it whole again. I was bemoaning this to someone recently and they said, tartly, that I could “buy a Honda” if I had a problem with old Italian motorcycles. Point taken. Point rejected.
In the years I have remaining, there just isn’t the time to drill down sufficiently into my peculiarities. One of them seems to be a need to own mechanical devices either too sophisticated (see above) or too simple (the air-cooled 67-claimed-horsepower flat-four in my VW bus) for their own good. This attraction to polar opposites is a longstanding bugaboo of mine. My current taste in music tends to either gravitate toward twentieth-century orchestral music—Henryk Górecki floats my boat—or kick-ass old-school country music like the hardscrabble Texan Charlie Crockett. It’s all the stuff in the middle I’m ambivalent about. Like Taylor Swift songs. Or reliable, sensible, oil-tight, high-performance Japanese motorcycles. Perhaps my head was unduly pinched while exiting the birth canal.
The first race of the season came and went. Without me. I sat down with a stiff drink and gave myself a good talking to. My personal life, to paraphrase Tom Waits, became an emotional cul-de-sac over the winter. I’ll be kind enough to spare you the details, but my life has zigged and zagged as unpredictably as those water bugs that scoot across the surface of a lake. All of us, it seems, go through some sort of turmoil in this life. Maybe your daughter married an idiot. Maybe your son is that idiot, and right now, beneath your feet, your son and his wife (who, truthfully, could have done so much better) are conceiving children in your basement. Children you may have to raise yourself once this young woman comes to her senses, splits, and your son turns back to video games. My heart goes out to you.
Amid my winter and spring of turmoil, gravitating to my shed has given me untold solace. Even just firing up my Honda generator—that powers my tire warmers—was a jump-step back to a world of familiarity. And, for many of us, it’s this familiarity motorcycling bestows upon us. (Footnote: when I just need something to run I buy a Honda. Ditto for my lawnmower and snowblower. I’m not that foolish.)
Much has been made in recent years of the necessity to prioritize mental health. Rightly so. And now that my mental health is inextricably tied to motorcycling, I can justify the purchase of items related to it as self-care. Oprah would be proud of me. (My mother, however, would have seen through this ruse.)
My self-care binge has meant hours that could have been spent as a productive member of society have been diverted into personal wellbeing. My first act of self-love involved a new chain and sprockets for my just-resurrected Ducati 900SS. Ducatis of a certain age were delivered from the factory with absurdly tall gearing so their clattery engines could meet noise regulations. This gearing gave a humble 75 horsepower motorcycle the theoretical top speed somewhere north of 250 miles-per-hour. In reality, however, it means the bike, at semi-legal road speeds, has three or, at best, four speeds, as fifth and sixth gear are tailwind-down-the-mountain only gears. Adding three teeth to the rear sprocket that’s currently on the bike will give me six real-world cogs.
Choosing sprockets was easy—I went with steel, for longevity. But the chain was a different matter. Chain manufacturers make a dizzying number of variants and don’t do a particularly good job of clarifying what chain best suits which bike. I didn’t want to under-spec a chain but I also didn’t need a $350 chain that could withstand the twist from a turbocharged Hayabusa.
Complicating these matters is the unfortunate fact that I’m either a compulsive over-thinker or reckless under-thinker. Rare is that I match an appropriate degree of thinking to a task. I’ve blithely made choices with potentially dire ramification only to sweat-it-out over things that don’t matter much at all. Like which chain to buy for a 75-horsepower motorcycle. Finally, I narrow it down to two. Chain A is for bikes up to 750 cc claims the manufacturer, while chain B is good to 1,200 cc. The Ducati has 904 cc. You see the problem. While a 750 cc Japanese four makes more power than the Ducati, its V-twin makes a lot of torque. Now I can’t decide which causes more grief for a chain—torque or horsepower. I spend half a day reading up on the difference between torque and horsepower. At first, I understand it. But then, after the sixth or seventh article, I’m not so sure anymore. I’ve taken in too much information. Two days later I order the chain rated for displacements of up to 1.200 cc, secure in the knowledge that it will outlive me. By decades.
Next up in my rehabilitation is a carburetor rebuild kit for the Ducati, as it sat for years and has re-developed the nasty habit of leaking fuel onto the garage floor. I contact Sudco in California as they stock everything Keihin, only to find that after decades in business they closed up shop. Last week. In our age of connectivity, you’d think it’d be easy to find a carb rebuild kit. Not so. I call a place that directs me to another place that suggests I try Japan. Japan! Eventually, I find a place in Michigan that has what I need. Only to be informed that I need to determine which variant of Keihin carb I have. A half-dozen emails later it’s straightened out. I hope. I’ll let you know.
The upside of this orgy of mechanical fortification is that the personal woes that precipitated this frenzy have been all but forgotten. Next week I’ll pick up the racebike engine and get that back together. In the past few days I’ve been feeling so good I’ve forgotten that I’ve ever had a blue period. Finally, at long last, I’m back on my feet.
