All ones and zeroes

Blimey, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? All sorts of stuff has happened in the past few months, and I’ve really been a bit lazy with regard to keeping this lot updated. If you cast your mind back to, erm, July, I mentioned that I had plans for some track time and a quick jaunt to France. Both of those things did indeed happen, but in time honoured fashion, I’m not going to talk about them just yet. No, the first thing I want to talk about is this:

Yup, I’ve finally brought the TRX kicking and screaming (well, farting and droning) into the digital age, with a lovely Ignitech programmable ignition unit. Actually getting hold of this is another story in its own right, which I’m sure will be told later. What’s particularly nice about this story though is that there’s another TRX850 that’s just been rescued from the great scrappy in the sky, and it’s now owned by my mate Foz. I’d originally planned to buy the bike myself, but my car threw a bearing in the rear diff, and I couldn’t justify spending the money. However, plans were rapidly thrown together with Alex from Darvill Racing and Foz, and I ended up swapping a spare stock CDI unit that I had in the garage for the Ignitech unit. So, what will this do for the bike? Well, I’m not entirely sure so far… but it does mean that I can plug it into a laptop now and pretend to be in a MotoGP paddock. Current plan is to just run the bike for a while (at least until I’ve replaced the car and let my finances recover a bit), and then take it to Spike at Cambridge Motorcycles for some dyno time, and maybe some tweaking of the advance map to suit the FCR41s. This is the first time I’ve ever owned a bike that can be tuned with a laptop rather than a set of riffler files, so I’m going to bore everyone stupid for the next six months, talking about programmable dwell times and shift light outputs.

So, looking a bit further back, we went to France. This was, undoubtedly, the highlight of the year for me. It was a bit of a trek for sure, which really started a long time before ever booking the tunnel crossing… Some time last year, my friend Michael, with whom I’d shared several good bottles of wine, many happy evenings together, and even an avalanche, suggested that Sol and me, and our families, take a trip to his place in Burgundy for a week of summer sun. This seemed like a fabulous idea, so over a large roast dinner and a couple of bottles of wine, a plot was hatched. The Lovely Faye, Sue, and the girls would all jump on a flight to Geneva, and hire a car to get to Chantisy. Meanwhile, Sol and I would ride. A proper road trip. The first challenge really was to ensure that the bikes were up to the job. I wasn’t too concerned, as I use mine for work every day anyway, but as Sol has written about on his blog, his Katana was always going to need a bit more work, as it was still in a pile of bits in the corner of his garage. Here be spiders. About five months of weapons grade procrastination followed, which was brilliantly enjoyable, but not ultimately productive, and so, a week before we were due to travel, we ended up in Sol’s garage frantically stripping forks, changing the oil, and re-lockwiring everything again.

The journey down to Michael’s place was, of course, brilliant. We left Cambridge about about midnight, got the 03:20 train, and by 05:00 or so local time, we were riding out of Calais. It’s worth mentioning at this point that Sol’s mighty Katana is probably the only bike that is louder than my TRX in the country. When we left Sol’s house at midnight, we actually walked the bikes about 100metres down the road before starting them up… Anyhow, the kilometres rolled past, and the initial bone-chilling cold soon passed as the sun rose:

Yeah. That Katana. It has 145bhp. You would, wouldn’t you?

I can’t remember how long the ride was. I think it was about 900kms or so, but it was all bloody brilliant. The only mechanical worry was the oil consumption of the TRX. It gets through about a litre per 1500kms at the speeds we were carrying, so I just had to keep topping it up every now and then. This simple sounding act is made more challenging by the design decision that Yamaha came to when they placed the oil filler on a vertical surface. I’d like to have words with the team that approved that idea.

While in France, we also had the pleasure of a nice jaunt through the Jura mountains, and over the Col de la Faucille. This was some of the best riding I’ve ever done, no question. The roads were brilliant, the scenery was exactly not like The Fens at all, and the weather was brilliant. But the best thing was following Sol. The Kat, being long, low, and brutally fast, is completely out of it’s element on these roads really, particularly when we started gaining altitude and encountering damp patches and damaged road surfaces due to the winter freeze/thaw cycle. The TRX felt beautifully nimble and surefooted on the excellent Conti SportAttack3 tyres. The Kat was obviously keeping Sol *very* occupied. I may have laughed out loud on more than one occasion as Sol brutally wrestled the recalcitrant Kat into some sort of shape to get around a corner. For sure he missed a lot of apexes, but gratifyingly, he also managed to miss the 300 metre drop on the outside of some of the corners too. All too soon though, it was time to head home, and leave Burgundy behind. As I sit here typing this, at the end of a quite extraordinary summer, I realise that I’ve fallen a little bit more hopelessly and totally in love with France. I could carry on typing for hours, I’m sure, about the discovery of the beautiful local Aligoté wine. The marvellous collection of old bikes, cars, and aeroplanes at the equally magnificent Château de Savigny-les-Beaune, and the brilliant French guy riding the Haga rep Mille who we kept seeing, scowling and straining the guts out of a disgracefully weedy little rollup cigarette on the journey home. But that would really just be self indulgent twoddle.

So, there was something else, wasn’t there? Ah, yup. Cadwell Park. The TRX did indeed make it back onto a circuit for the first time in a few years. And while it acquitted itself well, it wasn’t all beer and skittles.

The stupid Renegade exhausts limited the amount of fun that could be had, by grounding out at every opportunity. Now, given that they are appallingly badly made, and look awful, I’m even more determined to replace them with something better. Any ideas out there, I’m all ears. All that said, other than the ground clearance, the bike was lovely to ride on the track. And, I know that I’m biased, but it’s also safe to say that it was by far the best sounding bike out there. Will there be more track time in the future? Well, given that I’ve just installed a programmable ignition unit, it would be a shame not to set up an ignition map for track use, wouldn’t it?

What a brilliant summer it’s been. And I’m sure that there’s going to be a few new developments over the coming months too. Plans are afoot. On more than one front.