The mind can do funny things to a person sometimes. Looking back at childhood or any other time in the past can lead us to remember only the good things, until we build up the memory to be far more wondrous than the reality of it all. In a similar way, the three weeks it took from when I paid a deposit on the bike until it arrived in my driveway gave me enough time for the mental image of this bike to have morphed almost perfectly into the memory of my former pristine bike in the 1990s.
It was a cold, dry day in July when the truck arrived, holding the item that I’d been hunting for six months, and as it was rolled out, the state of it was enough to make all my inflated expectations return to Earth with a very large thud. The scratches were all much worse than they had looked in the photos, including a few serious cracks, and it looked like what it was – a nigh-on thirty year old bike that had done a lot of work, and that would need a lot of love to get it to where I wanted it to be.
I was not prepared for it. Ifelt sick. I wanted to cry. I wanted to lament my stupidity for buying a bike with no known history, no service record, no clarity on the number of kilometres it had done (the 10k on the gauge was either wrong, or it had been clocked – which is a possibility), with a bald rear tyre and a noisy timing chain.
It was, indeed, a piece of crap.
It was also at this very moment that I realised that I had absolutely no idea about doing up a motorbike. I’d done minor repairs on my car, and many years ago had stripped down and rebuilt a Datsun engine with a friend who was an apprentice mechanic, but I had no idea how the heck one of these worked, even though I’d been riding bikes for over twenty years.
On the upside – it at least started. It idled. It went into first gear, it moved up the driveway and it stopped when I squeezed the brakes. And the feel of it as I sat on it and reached forward to the bars did give me the same feeling of connectedness, of fit, that I remembered with the old bike. I’ve ridden quite a few bikes in my time, and the FZR was the one that clicked with me in terms of its ergonomics above all others, and the twenty years since I had last sat on one hadn’t changed that one bit. The flat tank that I had once carried slabs of beer around on (true story), the indents in the fake tank cover that my knees just seemed to fit so perfectly into, the high pegs, the uncomfortable stretch to reach the bars – these interface points all still felt right, very right, even if the overall package was one that was long past its prime.
It was most definitely not in ‘great condition’ as the seller had told me, but it was something.
It was a start.
And like it or not, it was mine.
Next: The road to roadworthy.