Leaderboard

Today’s view from the cockpit having taken a shortcut to the shops.

I have a lot of contacts (Biker B&B's) spread out across Southern Spain......for example it's €20 a night here. Or it was last year!

I bet I could talk mum into letting you visit Canada, we are nice wholesome folk here.

It's a curse having a personality in the modern world!

Indeed, @Bruce thing is, usually it's only really loud people that think I'm mature just because I normally speak in a very calm way, and am quiet or reserved with my emotions when faced with very effusive people. Pete, quite the opposite, is louder than a spanish old woman and roars his laughter.

I was just getting to that.....don't worry you are all invited. Party at the Grasshopper's! ?? Everyone is invited....BUT NOT @Beemer Bummer, sorry bud! lol

Oh God, I'd forgotten this one !

I want to go butt mum says y;all are a bad influence, i used to be a nice boy

Well if you have to choose one......this is it Bob. Anything could happen if @Dell is here......and it usually does! You think about it......nobody's ever forgotten his previous visit in 2007 when he was clinically diagnosed as a Negro! And the image of him with his pants round his ankles getting an injection in his ass while going into an instant bath of perspiration is something you never forget.

I have about five plans for this years trip already floating around in my head , personally I don't think I'll be going anywhere in Europe this year. It'll be a no go due to Covid rules (isolating) or we'll be priced out of any travel .

It looks like there could be a plan taking shape here. @Richzx6r, @Six30......and now @Dell seems up for it. And when Dell comes to Spain you just know something's going to happen. Broken bones, smashed bikes, exploding cars, ferries running aground, and planes not flying are just par for the course when Dell is involved. So who else has got the cojones for this carnage? @Sir Fallsalot..... @boboneleg........you guys like to walk on the wild side, and there's nothing going to be wilder than this shit!

Now you are getting it..... A quiet reserved accountant by day... Then by night a _______________ ! Well, I can't give away all my secrets, just fill in the blank with your imagination. ?

See this hot weather look you, it's not bloody good enough see. Just give me 16 years, my old welsh spell book, 1,000 sacrificial lambs (but not the good looking one) and then Boyo watch this space....... I shall make it snow just like home!

You liked those boats, dinnit ya?

Kevin Cameron has been writing about motorcycles for nearly 50 years, first for Cycle magazine and, since 1992, for <em>Cycle World</em>. (Robert Martin/)Back in the 1980s I wrote a TDC column (then in Cycle) titled “Sleeping in Vans.” It was about weekends spent roadracing at tracks within a few hundred miles of Boston. We drove to them overnight, leaving 11 p.m. Friday and arriving for sign-up and first practice the next morning. Whoever wasn’t driving slept in the right-hand seat, far short of a bed. Trust whoever’s driving not to doze off, as he will soon trust you. No heroics—each drove one tank of gas. At the track, unload (no ramp—these 35 hp 250s weighed 25 pounds less than a Lambretta), put the bikes on their stands, and head for registration. Mix two-stroke oil and gas, gas up, air up. If you hadn’t entered by mail and been given numbers in advance, you cut them out of shelf paper and stuck them on. This was the 1960s, when gas was 32 cents, and you could—if you paid dealer net for parts—replace a piston and its single ring for $6. If you seized when the heat of combustion made the piston too big for the cylinder, there were two possibilities. A happy seizure was one that could be cleared by just removing melted piston aluminum from the cylinder wall by sanding or hydrochloric acid. Slip a fresh piston and ring on that con-rod, drop the cleaned-up cylinder back over the studs, and you’re good. A sad seizure? When you pulled the heads and saw the porous chrome plating of the bore was chipped or peeled. Junk. That meant a fresh cylinder. Forty-odd dollars flew away. RELATED: Man In A Van With A Plan 2.0—The 2017 Season In Review Seizing was death and taxes: inevitable. The game was to jet down until the spark plug insulators were white—appliance white—because power rose as you neared the best-power mixture. There were no oxygen sensors, so tuning relied on “reading” the spark plugs for the information they gave. If your engine was correctly timed “out of the truck,” checking again after first practice would reveal that the mag was now out of time. With a dial gauge and holder screwed into a spark plug hole, and the trusty Okuda Koki meter’s clip leads across that cylinder’s contact breaker, you slowly rotate the engine to find TDC, zero the dial gauge, and back up the crank to see where the points were opening. Then you retimed at 2.0mm BTDC. Track food? Soggy sandwiches from the cooler? You pick. Another practice and the clutch is slipping. Lay the bike on its right side to avoid draining the trans oil and pull off the left-hand engine cover to get at the clutch. We didn’t have spare clutches, just plates. So everything had to come apart to check each and every one. Is it coned? Is it blue? Is it cracked? Out with the bad, in with new from the spares box. Back together again. Track time and wrench time alternate. Everyone is tired but up. We are young men on a mission. The Vietnam War raged. The Beatles were new and fresh. No one could know his future. Off weekends we went to the North Shore to see and hear Chuck Berry or the Flamingos at the Ebbtide. The tracks were our natural home because racing pushed everything but now out of mind. I am real and my bike is real. Not sure about the rest. Sunday after racing, everything back in the van and homeward. We racers-for-a-day would emerge from the eight-hour return trip to jobs, phones, and bosses. The bikes went down the basement stairs and back onto their build stands. Another weekend was coming. Source

?

You not gna offer us from across the pond then? i see how it is

I;ll bet you could too.

I agree,..i wont be making any plans this year,..unfortunately

The biggest problem i can see happening is if they allow any travel the whole country is going to move all at once and everywhere will be heaving which is my worst nightmare so i'm happy to wait it out

I think this year is going to be pretty hit and miss regarding tourism here. Even if Brits are let into the country there may well be restrictions in place about not going into other towns or provinces etc. That's been in place for us for 4 months now.

I've written off this year again so not making any plans just going to see what happens as the year unfolds

About 25 minutes!

I was sat in a room for hours with two huge Rottweilers, watching films about motorcycle racing in the 70s, and drinking tea with milk in it. I am going to Morocco I am, there's even beer there if you ask gently

Me setting the Rottweilers on him and then burying him below the ground overnight made him the man he is today.

There not moving into my ward they can do one.?

It's started

Anything planed for summer in mountains and dirtroads that a GS could get up to as well? Just asking... I have two plans, Morocco for September/October and a bigger secret one for earlier, both depending of covid allowing me to go. Both involve exiting Europe so I might be hoping for more than possible. I am quite worried this whole pandemic is a cabal conjuring to mess up my travel plans

Who are you ya little jerkoff? You that punk DA919 hiding ya ass behind another handle??????

Tbh I would be riding south to my parents who live by stansted airport i could fairly easily ride down to Southampton to get the ferry to Santander within 5 or 6 hours, and I agree with six I wouldn't particularly want to be slogging for hours on end although I get that is all part of the adventure but I would much prefer to fly over and pick up a bike from the airport that would be easier to ride on some of the more challenging roads if we choose to do some dark motorcycling

2005......and just arrived in Spain!

This is you Pedro......

This is you, Pete:

Good that you are out, seems like another world out there.

That was really cool.

@Pedro eats them!

The burger van at a place I used to work did an excellent hoof & ring piece sausage.

First time ever.....very weird!

Pretty much a landslide your way, @XTreme, congratulations!

Not thinking about cold tires is one of the quickest ways to end your trackday early. (Courtesy of Michelin/)Everyone knows we crash on cold tires, but riders continue to crash on cold tires. My last crash (2013) was a cold tire—if you don’t count a stuck float coating the rear tire in Yamalube and 110-octane fuel—and most of my instructors’ last crashes were cold tires. And we’re supposed to be the professionals! I’m just back from Homestead Miami Speedway where we completed our first-ever ChampSchool and combined it with a trackday weekend put on by our friends at N2 Trackdays. We had a cold-tire crash in the school, and there were more than a few during the N2 days. Let’s Discuss All the Problems: 1. Lean angle is not your friend: We leave the pits on a cold tire and might be sitting in the middle of the seat because “it’s just the warm-up lap.” Wrong! Go full-GP right away. More body hanging off the inside of the bike equals less lean angle if all other things are the same. Try to look like Marquez right away. Get off the side of the bike. 2. The vast majority of cold-tire crashes are underloaded tires: We get to the first long-radius corner slowly because “it’s just the warm-up lap.” We enter the corner slowly and don’t need the brakes, so we’re riding through the beginning of the corner with the throttle open. Therefore the weight is to the rear, front tire is unloaded, and the contact patch is small. We get to where the radius tightens, or the “direction change,” and just add lean angle with the throttle open. Bam, we’re down because that little cold patch of rubber and silica (front tire) has no grip. We asked the front tire to steer the bike without a load on it. We must learn to close the throttle and even sneak on 2 percent of brakes to put a load onto that little piece of hard rubber that needs heat to become rubber with mechanical and chemical grip. 3. Waiting on pit road: We pull our warmers at third call and roll onto the grid, but a rider in the previous session runs out of gas on the checkered flag. The crash truck rolls, and we sit with heat leaking off our tires. We might even get impatient. When the green flag waves our tires have cooled and our ire has risen. When forced to wait, our first priority must be tire temperature. 4. Our competitive urges become our first priority: We roll onto the grid at third call and spy that rider we feel compelled to catch and pass. That thought becomes prioritized above cold tires, and we ask too much of a tire not yet at temperature. Make cold-tire management our first priority in every session. 5. Forgetting that tires have two sides: At Inde Motorsports Ranch, our winter home in Arizona, the first four corners of the 21-corner lap are all right-hand turns. By the fourth corner, the Dunlop Q3+ tires we run are starting to feel pretty darn good. “Time to go, baby!” Bam, we’re down in turn 5 because the left side of the tire is still cold and untouched. We must remember to warm (use) both sides of the tire; if our track has a predominance of left-hand corners, the left side of the tire will warm more quickly than the right. 6. We are told to “follow me” in a session: A coach or a friend invites us to follow them and they leave the pits quickly on blanket-warmed tires while we roll out on air-temperature tires. We mistakenly prioritize staying with them over warming our rubber. Then we crash chasing them because our tires simply aren’t ready for their pace. Warming our tires is priority one, no matter the offer. 7. Not taking note of the weather: A windy, cold, overcast day produces pavement temps that make tire-warming an even longer process. A chilly wind pulls heat off the pavement even if the sun is shining. That same chilly wind pulls heat off our tires as we sit in hot pit waiting for our session’s green flag. Winter trackdays are phenomenal in terms of comfort and cool intake air, but extra care and time must be given to tire warming. 8. We don’t note the pace: Some trackdays mandate “no passing” for the first two laps of the first morning session. We pull our warmers and roll out, only to be caught behind someone who is extra cautious and slow. During those two laps, our tires lose heat as they roll unloaded around the track. We then crash on the third lap as we impatiently blast past on tires significantly cooler than they were in pit lane. When we’re forced to ride slowly, we must restart our tire-warming procedures. 9. We pull our warmers with gloved hands: Third call echoes through the paddock and we yank our warmers and roll out. Unbeknownst to us, our front warmer popped a fuse and that tire is cold. We crash because we weren’t in the habit of always pulling our warmers with at least one bare hand to check heat. If a crew member pulls warmers, they must check the tire surface temperature with a bare hand. 10. Mid-session changes: It’s common to pit halfway through a session to make a change to the bike. As our tires sit and cool, our mind is on the change. As we roll back out on a cooler tire, our mind is on the results of the change, and that is not the correct focus. The results of the change can only be focused on after our tires are back to temperature. Liquid-cooled tires: We will occasionally ride on a drying track, or a track with puddles or streams that don’t dry as quickly as the line dries. We might think, “Be careful through the stream because wet pavement can be slippery,” but I’ve seen some extremely gifted riders crash after the stream. They tip-toed through the water and then went back to speed too early. This crash is also due to stream water getting into our tires’ siping, but we must take into account the cooling effects of water on rubber. Cold Tires! At ChampSchool our habit is to yell “Cold tires!” as we are getting ready to ride. We’ve learned to tell students to re-warm their tires after they get off a two-up lap because we’ve had cold-tire crashes on bikes that have sat for five minutes in a chilly breeze. Same advice after we’ve stopped to watch a demonstration before a drill. We’ve learned to stop the van in turn 5 at Inde Motorsports Ranch or turn 3B at New Jersey Motorsports Park to identify these turns as the first left-hand turns of the lap and a common place for cold-tire crashes. We’re learning through hard knocks. You don’t have to learn this way; think “cold tires” in every scenario described above, whether you’re on the street or track. Use our experience to skip over the silliest, stupidest, and most-avoidable money waster in our sport: the cold-tire crash. “Cold tires!” More next Tuesday! Source

Love this shot! ?