Madness on two wheels

The other day I was chased by a swarm of bees. They had really big stingers on them. They weren’t actually bees but they sounded very similar to a swarm of bees. They were in fact mopeds. And they didn’t have big stingers on them either; they just had massive pricks on them. Technically they weren’t chasing me either; they just happened to be behind me while I was driving. It took every ounce of my limited self control not to slam my brakes on and scatter them all like bowling balls.

If people who drive Nissan Micras are the herpes of the road, people who ride mopeds are the gonorrhoea. They are just so pointless. And slow. The imbeciles who ride them don’t seem to appreciate how slow they are and will gleefully sit in the middle of the road - or more often hog the central reservation - while a train of irate drivers forms an orderly queue behind them, all with one single thought in their head: Die.

Mopeds are generally owned by teenage boys and middle-aged women. The spotty kids who ride them think they are Evil Kenevil and seem completely oblivious to the fact that they look utterly ridiculous. Why they can’t wait another year until they are old enough to drive a proper vehicle is beyond me. The middle-aged women who ride them are even worse because everybody knows that middle-aged women can’t do anything useful with something that has an engine in it. Both are a menace.

People who ride proper motorbikes are also a menace but for completely the opposite reason. They all seem hell bent on ending their life by whizzing down motorways at twice the speed of sound and weaving in between cars. On country roads they always insist on sitting on your rear bumper until there is a blind corner. Only then do they make their move, seemingly with the intention of making the driver of the inevitable oncoming vehicle to empty their bowels and veer into a hedge. Then, once past, they dive directly in front of your car and brake sharply so they can repeat the same stunt on the car in front.

I’ve personally never seen the appeal of motorbikes. This is partly because I know I would be a bigger menace than most riders and piss people like me off but also because I know I would end up dead very quickly. I’m dangerous enough on my mountain bike. Give me 750cc of raw power and I would be very dangerous indeed. In fact my last thought on this earth would be “I wonder how fast this thing can go?” before finding out by making a human-shaped hole in a wall or through someone’s windscreen.

I have always been more of a car person but do occasionally watch MotoGP. Formula 1 has become so painfully boring now and the enjoyment has been removed even further due to politics and stupid rule changes from a governing body who couldn’t govern their own toilet breaks. On the few occasions I’ve sat down and watched motorbike racing, it strikes me as being an incredibly close and often exciting sport. Having said that, it has lost some of its appeal since Suzi Perry stopped presenting.

Another problem with Formula 1 is that the element of danger has been largely taken out. Obviously this is a good thing for the most part, but I think a lot can be said for the excitement provided by knowing that there is nothing but insanity standing between someone pushing the boundaries of the limit and certain death.

While Formula 1 drivers sit nicely strapped in and cocooned in a carbon fibre monocoque shell with padded head rests, high-intensity crumple zones and a million and one other safety measures to ensure they don’t get hurt, motorcycle riders sit on a machine of pure death. Every single part of their body is exposed to the elements and if they crash, they fly off at close to 200 mph and will hit a wall. With their face.

Yet they still drive with utter commitment and are obviously on the limit. I think it is therefore safe to assume that they are all completely insane. The way they take corners, defying physics, with the side of the bike horizontal to the road and only being kept upright because they are pressing their knees into the tarmac is both fascinating to watch and bloody scary. The way they fall off their steeds, slide along the asphalt on their backsides, somersault through gravel traps and then get up, dust themselves off and get back on the bike deserves respect. The way the winner of a race performs a wheelie at 100mph with only one hand on the handlebars while he punches the air with the other leaves me in awe. There is also a small part of me that would like to see them fall off the back but only because I think it would be funny.

I’m not saying that Formula 1 drivers aren’t brave (although their constant whinging about safety sometimes makes me wonder if any of them actually have a backbone) and there have been some great and daring drivers in the sport’s history. Comparing the great drivers from different eras is a pointless task because they all competed at different times, with different people, in different cars, on different tracks, in different conditions. There is absolutely no way of gauging a driver from the 50’s to a current driver because so much has changed.

With the top level of motorcycle racing having remained at 500cc since its inception back in 1949 and the fundamental aspects of the motorcycle not having changed much, it is slightly easier to compare the champions. The great riders can be rated on a scale of 1 to clinically insane. Guys like John Surtees, Mike Hailwood, Giacomo Agostini and Kenny Roberts were all crackers, and Barry Sheene was always stoned. Valentino Rossi is the greatest rider of his era and is largely regarded as being the greatest rider of all time. You only have to look at the guy to realise that he is just a little bit mental.

Although they haven’t had many champions over the years, MotoGP has always been very popular in Spain. They have had some notable riders over the years, which suggests the Spanish may also be quite crazy. This surprises me because I’ve always compared Spanish people to Sloths; lazy, slow, dim-witted creatures who do nothing but sleep during the day. Mopeds are also very common there. This may explain why many teenagers come back from holidays in Spain with gonorrhoea.