by Paul Carter
When Simon and Howard got out of the cab at the workshop, you would not see the oil men inside for the clean veneer of corporate respectability glistening in the sun, their respective halos twinkling.
‘You look like shit,’ Howard says, grinning.
There were man-hugs all round before I shoved them into a university car and we drove across Adelaide to pick up two fully kitted four-wheel-drive campers. There is very little accommodation on Lake Gairdner (the Mt Ive homestead nearby has some cabins and rooms but they’re just too far away from the action), so we opted for the motorhome option while on the salt.
Two hours later we all pulled up at the motel I’d booked in the middle of Adelaide’s main strip and general drunk-ridden vomit-slicked Hindley Street for Saturday night. The plan was to head out to the salt lake on Sunday morning then stay in the campervans. However, Speed Week coincides with the annual Clipsal 500 V8 car races so every hotel, motel, shitty flea-bag dump decided to triple their rates and demand full payment in advance. I didn’t realise that every available hotel room that was remotely decent had been booked months ago, so in my last-minute haste I only managed to get a shared room for three in an excuse for a motel.
‘Right, so, Mr Carter, that’s a room for three and parking for three vehicles for Saturday, 19 March.’ The lady sounded very nice on the phone.
‘Yes, all good,’ I said.
‘And in case you didn’t see our website, sir, we are gay-friendly here.’
‘Pardon?’ I said.
‘Our motel is very gay-friendly.’
‘Well, ah, okay, that’s good to know, but I’m not gay.’
‘Of course, you’re not, Mr Carter, I just thought I would mention that our motel is—’
I cut her off. ‘Yes, I know, very gay-friendly.’
As we pulled up at the motel looking for the parking spaces I’d also paid for in advance, the horror started to set in. The directions basically had us parked in a real rapetastic overgrown lot off a seedy alleyway at the rear of what looked like a derelict building. I phoned to make sure we had the right place. Yep, this was our gay-friendly motel.
They’d slapped me with a $490 per night bill for a horrid little toilet of a room. Simon walked in and looked like I’d just crapped in his latte. ‘Fuckin’ hell, Pauli, this is the best you could do? I wouldn’t let my dog kip in this dump—and they think we’re gay.’
Howard set to work fixing the aircon unit that looked older than me. It groaned then sparked a bit before shuddering to life, shaking the room and making the whole experience feel like a railroad boxcar on the way to the annual gay festival in gay town.
We went out that night full of excitement and anticipation. Colin was set to meet us for dinner, but he was running a bit late. While I was standing outside the bar next to the restaurant on Hindley Street enjoying the rabble of perpetual wallopingly drunk teenagers all on a full-blown binge-drinking exercise in liver demolition, he called me and as soon as I heard his tone I knew it was bad.
‘I’m so sorry, mate, but Speed Week just got cancelled,’ he said.
Colin explained that the DLRA officials had arrived at Lake Gairdner and discovered two things: it was raining hard, and the entrance from the land to the salt was badly damaged. There’s a special rubber ramp that you’re supposed to use when you take your vehicle onto the salt, otherwise the salt gets damaged. It’s simple, really—the ramp’s right there, you just need to set it up and off you go. But there’s always an exception, some selfish idiot. Just prior to the DLRA’s arrival, a TV commercial was shot on the salt involving a four-wheel-drive cruising about on the salt and making pretty circles with its wheels, revealed at the end of the ad via a chopper shot—wow, how clever. They didn’t bother to use the ramp, though, and fucked up the entrance. That severely upset the Indigenous community and the DLRA. Mother Nature then decided to turn Lake Gairdner back into a lake, raining heavily over the past two days. Even though the lake had been known to dry up rapidly, the DLRA made the call to cancel the event.
I was floored with disappointment. All the work, the planning, everything—this was our shot and it just got taken away.
Colin arrived at the pub soon after and we all sat down and stared at the floor. None of us it took it well. Colin was philosophical, of course, but I could tell he was crushed. The other Speed Week crews were equally subdued; it was like we’d gone from a buck’s party to a wake.
‘All that gear and the vehicles are non-refundable,’ I moaned into my beer. I’d just spent eight grand for nothing. What now?
Well, we did what motivated, capable, intelligent, educated men do in these situations and got drunk.
At some point between beer and whiskey o’clock, Colin came up with a brilliant idea and suggested we depart for the test track in the morning and at least ride the bike. Then he jumped on the phone to wake someone up and organise it. Simon booked himself the first available flight back to Brisbane—I was sorry to see him go but he does have a whole drilling division of a major multinational to run, so he was packed and out of our shitty gay motel before we could convince him to have another Bloody Mary. Howard stayed on. ‘I want to see it run, mate,’ he said, grinning.
Speed Week may have been officially cancelled, but there’s no stopping a bunch of lunatics with a fast bike and a test track.
EAGLES
SUNDAY MORNING, first light, grey impending clouds collided overhead rumbling a death rattle that hammered back the fact that Speed Week was cancelled. The dank mood that hung in the air mixed with our hungover beer breath as we quietly and painfully pulled out of Adelaide. The drive was silent—Colin, Howard, Ed and Steve, one of the mechanics from the uni, all sat deep in post-beer thought.
Two hours later we pulled off the highway into Tailem Bend test track, 100 kilometres southeast of Adelaide. A former Nissan facility, the test track was now privately owned. It had a 1.4-kilometre straight that I was about to point the bike down and hopefully she would give me the good news.
The rain kicked in closely followed by powerful gusts running left to right across the track. We all paused as if to silently ask,‘Should we stop and wait for the weather to change?’ But we all knew it was only going to get worse.
The bike slowly rolled out the rear doors of its giant trailer and sat there in the rain on the tarmac, looking for a fight.
We set about prepping her for the first run. The rear fairing was removed, bolts checked and marked, chain checked and lubed, diesel poured into her small tank while I peeled on my body armour: a leather racing suit, boots, helmet and finally gloves.
My mouth went dry as I threw my leg over her massive bulk and settled into the seat. Her frame had been built around mine—it was like putting on a tailored smoking jacket in a gentleman’s club for sociopaths. But I had no fear of consequences, none at all.
Steve strapped the red emergency stop cord to my wrist and flipped up the three bright red switch covers concealing the fuel pump start, fuel management module and the engine start button. He primed the throttle and flicked the first two switches and the bike whirred, the digital instrument cluster blinking to life, tiny bulbs glowing green and needles jumping to indicate fuel and oil pressure, battery levels, engine temp, oil temp, engine revs and speed. He looked directly at me, grabbing the sides of my helmet: ‘Push it.’
I nodded, looked down over the metre-wide front end surrounded by a massive green fairing, inside a cockpit of lights, gauges and switches. Fear suddenly rose up into my throat. Before it reached my head I pushed the engine start button and she barked, shuddering alive with that unmistakeable diesel rumble.
‘In your own time, mate,’ Colin said. He was standing with Steve to my left. Straight ahead was 1.4 k’s of grey wet track. At the other end was a series of orange traffic cones indicating where I needed to grab the brakes. We had been over the length of the track, removing any stones and looking for irregularities; I’d made a mental note of a small pothole about halfway down slightly
right of centre.
Rain streaked down the windshield as I leant well forward into the bike’s almost prone riding position. I pulled in the clutch and selected first gear; she jerked slightly as the gear dropped in with a reassuring thunk. I glanced down at my revs and gunned the throttle a couple of times, the needle rising and falling with the engine . . . It was time to hit the playground.
I tuned into the sound of her engine as my right hand rolled the throttle back and my left released the clutch. She pulled hard, rolling forward and gathering speed much faster than I’d expected. I slipped down and back into the seat base and let my feet find the pegs. Laying my chest down over the front end, I focused on the horizon and popped her into second. She was smooth and accelerating as fast as my regular bikes do.
Third gear at 2500 rpm and 100 kph dead straight no problems, I cruised to the end of the track and discovered she has the turning circle of a battleship. The wind gusts had been picking up and I was very conscious of them and the wet track, but the bike was just so big and heavy it reassured me, so by the time I’d gone down the track four times I was ready to see just how fast we could go.
Again I found third gear within six seconds, but this time I rolled the throttle wide open through the gearbox, red-lining the gear changes. She pulled away hard and I found my position behind the windshield, no wobbles, tank-slapping or body-tensing moments. She roared as her revs hit 3500, still pulling away in third. At 160 kph I popped her into fourth. There was a surge of power; at full throttle north of 4000 rpm she took off like the horizon just stole her handbag.
The blur of the trackside shrunk into the periphery as my vision fixed on the end of grey line ahead. The first orange traffic cone was coming up fast; I held the throttle open although everything told me not to, glanced down, passing 170 kph.
I don’t know what the odds are, you tell me, on a windy, rainy day, but right at that moment, not one but two eagles decided to fly across the track at head height.
I pinged the movement in my line of sight, stopped my brain from making my reflexes roll off the throttle, and smashed on. At that speed hitting an eagle wasn’t going to make any difference, it was all in the hands of the gods now.
Bird one didn’t see me hammering at him but bird two did; he slammed on the brakes, looking for height, while I passed through the gap between them.The funny thing is, when I tell friends these sort of stories, as I’ve always done, they invariably say, ‘Bullshit’ then ‘Did you get a photo?’ Well, this time I did; one of the guys was snapping away and the moment was caught on camera.
After that nothing else existed except the howling engine. Vibrations suddenly shaking her under me, I broke my fixation on the end of the track to dart my eyes down—177 kph and still accelerating hard.
This sort of bike, at this speed, on a track in these conditions will, I can assure you, concentrate your mind in a way you can never replicate again. I had to slow down my brain; it wanted to process double the input at 170 than it did at 70.
Piercing the static air at this speed was harder for her than learning the Russian alphabet backwards. Pushing through it for me was not just a case of holding on at full throttle. Think about all those multimillion-dollar Formula One wind-tunnel-tested racing cars you occasionally see getting flipped over or hurled into a tree by the beast that is air resistance. Parts shear off, vibrate to bits, flat-out shatter or make so much noise you can feel it in your teeth. The bike suddenly started doing all these things.
As I passed the last orange traffic cone, where I was supposed to grab the brakes, I felt the gods of speed laugh and welcome a new convert to the fold. I pictured the bleached white salt stretching into the void until the boundary between the sky and the horizon is blurred . . . then the beast, its eyes dead and dark, leant over the fairing and punched me straight in the face.
The entire front end of the bike suddenly lifted effortlessly into the air, my horizon and the disappearing track replaced with sky. My heart and time stopped, every muscle went hypersensitive. I rolled off the power and the front wheel came down fast, hitting the track and staying straight, thank god. I, however, was not straight. While my front wheel was up in the air, the crosswind had pushed the front end a few inches to the right and I was now heading straight towards the edge of the track. The problem was that unlike a conventional motorcycle, I couldn’t just lean over and correct my line because this bike was a metre wide and only a few inches off the ground; if I did lean to correct my direction I would have bottomed out the engine on the asphalt and game over. So I jumped on both brakes, squeezing harder as the edge of the track was now out of view and somewhere underneath us.
She stopped a few feet from the end of the track and a few inches from the edge.
My heart started up again.
I cranked my head around to see the boys racing towards me in the car. They screamed to a stop next to me and jumped out.
‘Jesus, fuck, man, what happened?’ Steve could hardly get his words out. ‘You nearly took off.’
I was high as a kite. ‘You tell me, mate, you built the fuckin’ thing.’
For a few moments we all stood there in the rain, dumbfounded, just looking at the bike with a mixture of awe and fear.
Then Colin’s rocket-scientist voice cut through the silence. ‘Oh dear,’ he said without looking up from his clipboard which he was busily scribbling on.
Turns out with all the wind-tunnel testing and design, everyone forgot to compensate the suspension and fairing angle for my weight. There is a metal plate under the engine, part of the rules for salt-lake racing because you can’t drop any fluids on the track. So when I’m sitting on the bike, that flat and level plate is at a positive angle into the wind, and that means when we hit a certain speed, the bike lifts off.
Colin took some measurements and crunched the numbers right there on the track, muttering to himself like the mad scientist, and after a couple of minutes looked up from his clipboard. ‘Yeah, 177 is enough to generate the lift required to pick up the bike.’
‘No fuckin’ shit,’ I said from behind the car where a nervous pee was now being held onto while I tried to climb out of leathers and gloves before I had a real accident.
So, given that the bike nearly broke a world record for flight, albeit unintentionally—and I nearly copped an eagle in the head at 170 clicks—it’s probably a good thing we missed Speed Week that year. It was back to the drawing board; we had work to do and a whole year to wait before our next crack. But that’s okay, one thing I do have is lots of patience.
SID CARTER
MY SON, ACCORDING to the doctor, was not going to get out and into Wally World in the conventional fashion, he was just too big. So it was decided early in the pregnancy that Clare would need a caesarean section and before I knew it we were waiting sweaty-palmed and nervous in a veritable production line of very pregnant mothers. Lola was at home with Clare’s mum—‘The Cath’—who had flown over from Sydney just like she did for us when Lola was born. I was hugely grateful to her; I simply couldn’t face the thought of having Lola in another hospital with me and time to kill while Clare was going through hell in some room I wasn’t allowed into. At least this time I wasn’t projectile vomiting and no one appeared to have a broadsword buried in their chest.
One by one the ladies went through the big double doors with their men walking alongside. The men all had that expression on their face—faking the confident supportive role, but inside we’re thinking, ‘Thank fuck I don’t have to do this shit.’ It’s closely related to the facial expression we pull when we have to stop and ask for directions or if we’re at fault in a car accident.
Clare was going in next, we were cool, I was fetching her magazines, she was totally calm, I thought I was actually doing a pretty good job of distracting her mind from the guy in the green mask next door who was going to carve her up like a Sunday roast.
Then the call came in. ‘Mrs Carter, we’re ready for you.’
The room wa
s as I remembered when Lola was born, the giant metal arm coming out of the ceiling holding three round flashlights bent at the elbow like a transformer just put its arm in the wrong place while rummaging through the attic. The table-tennis set-up under the arm with the sheet strung up across the middle so Clare couldn’t see the Green Hornet split her open like a watermelon and dive both hands in up to the elbow. Busy people scooted about in white wellies and hairnets, I found my stool next to the table and faked a positive reassuring smile; small talk seemed so pointless, my mind went blank. She must be shit-scared by now.
The joyful masked anaesthetist leant in and started talking to us, but I was suddenly not listening as there was an immediate and very painful sensation growing in my flank; I even turned to look because it felt like someone had just tripped over and buried a scalpel in my back. Clare was already masked up, the Green Hornet was carving, my pain was wild but I blanked it out in time for Sid to appear at the top of the curtain, shrivelled and purple. Clare was happy but couldn’t see that from where I was standing she looked like a magi–cian’s accident.
Sid was a 9-pound whopper. I was a little shocked at the size of his member and pointed.
‘Oh, that’s perfectly normal,’ said a masked lady, handing me the scissors so I could cut through Sid’s umbilical cord.
‘Normal,’ I mused. It looked like a can of guinness with a cow’s heart on the end. My boy was a miracle.
There was just enough time to kiss my wife before she was whisked off to have the lower half of her body re-attached. Sid was also whisked off to have his nob recorded in the Guinness World Records. I smiled reassuringly as mother and child left then collapsed on the floor; I recognised this pain. After some writhing and moaning, I thought I saw the Green Hornet hovering over me, bloodied and wielding a knife, then the rest was a familiar blur.