"History is a wonderful thing, if only it was true"
-Tolstoy

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Ouch!

Discovered Ed Youngblood's MotoHistory
Great stuff

One piece - Cook Neilson interview
Motohistory.Net - Featured Story - Cook Neilson Remembers - Page 2:

This one on a particular dangerous bike.
I was pitched off of one and manged to collect some nasty scars
Both palms gone, right forearm, right nipple ground down (I was dumb, wearing a work shirt, sleeves rolled up, no gloves)
Front fender shook loose, and grabbed the front tire... I went down ... hard.

"And what we were doing WAS dangerous. It seemed that we were always a staffer or two short; it seemed that we had a charge account at the Westlake Village Hospital. We lost Dave Hawkins for a good long while; same with Dale Boller; same with me. I remember one time, after we'd published a particularly scathing road test of an H2 Kawasaki 750, I decided that I'd show the Kawasaki people exactly what I was talking about with regard to handling instability. There was this one corner on Mulholland Highway that was perfect for testing: fast and bumpy (it was on a section of that highway that became known as Racer Road). The Kawasaki guys showed up; I showed up. So I was whistling this 750 through this one very high-speed turn when it started to wobble. When that happened, the suspension started to oscillate, then the muffler on the left side started banging off the ground, then it high-sided me through a barbed wire fence and I ended up in the hospital ('Charge it!') for a little while. I certainly hadn't intended to be that dramatic, but the point was, as far as I was concerned, Kawasaki was selling a bike to the public that was fundamentally unsound, and we wanted them to either fix it, or get rid of it."

2 comments:

Dean said...

If only Cook was as fast as he thought he was.

JTH said...

reply to Dean "a legend in his own mind?"