AMOS, Julian - Test Rider the True Motorcycling Adventures of a Secret Development Test Rider

8/20/2019 AMOS, Julian - Test Rider the True Motorcycling Adventures of a Secret Development Test Rider

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About the Author

Julian has worked as a Motorcycle Development Test Rider since

1996 and has also contributed as a writer and photographer to

motorcycle magazines in the UK, Australia and Portugal. He hastravelled more than one million miles on motorcycles and visited 27

different countries whilst doing so.

He is also a student of archaeology, a musician, a keeper of pet goats

and a lover of dogs.


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For Dad

Arthur William Amos


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J ul i an mos

T E ST R I D E R :

T H E T R U E M O T O R C Y C L I N GA D V E N T U R E S O F A SE C R E T

D E V E L O P M E N T T E ST R I D E R


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Copyright © Julian Amos (2015)

The right of Julian Amos to be identified as author of this work has

been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this

publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims fordamages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British

Library.

ISBN 9781784559069 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781784559076 (Hardback)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2015)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.

25 Canada Square

Canary WharfLondon

E14 5LQ

Motorcycle illustration by Susan Franks

Printed and bound in Great Britain


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Acknowledgments

If it wasn’t for my father, Arthur Amos, I’d never have discovered the

real joy of motorcycles or learned about the wonderful art of home

mechanics – though I’m still not very good at it – not to mention my

interest in unusual and mostly unloved odd vehicles. Who else could

have owned such an eccentric collection of motors that included,

amongst others, a four seat kick-started BSA three wheeler, a two

stroke three cylinder four door Wartburg (pre-mix!), a plastic 850cc

Reliant Robin three wheeler and a Daf 33 ‘Variomatic’ driven byelastic bands? Fantastic!

If it wasn’t for my uncle, Ken (Eugene) Austin, I perhaps wouldn’t

have had such an interest in world travel or a taste for the better things

in life. If ever there was a dead-ringer for Roger Moore, it was him. I

also have my uncle to thank for instilling my passion for fine

motorcars and motorcycles that matches my love and enthusiasm for

the odd ones.

If it wasn’t for Nick Wilson I’d never have become a test rider or hadanything to write about.

If it wasn’t for Alan Cathcart and his enthusiastic encouragement, I

would never have plucked up either the courage or the audacity to

write this book.

If it wasn’t for my two original proofreaders; my mother, Yvonne

Amos-Caller, who is far more used to tales from the likes of Agatha

Christie or Colin Dexter than stories about motorbikes, and my other

‘ proofer ’ Pete Long – who appears fleetingly amongst these pages andis one of my oldest friends, then there would have been far more

mistakes within these covers.

If it wasn’t for the generous help of my old Triumph friends and ex-

colleagues, Paul Bowden and Julie Baker – who also appear in this

book – then the original short Kindle version would never have

materialized in the first place.

If it wasn’t for my long-suffering girlfriend, Susie, who spent many

months looking after our large family of four-legged furry-facedcritters all on her own while I sat on my backside and wrote and wrote

and wrote, then this book would never have got finished.

Thanks to you all.


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Foreword

Despite trying hard on occasions to look it, I’ve rarely been

sensible. Whilst my contemporaries have been getting married,

having children and settling into respectable jobs with good prospects, I’ve been getting on with the things I enjoyed when I was

a kid, – riding motorbikes and playing a guitar.

Occasionally my complacency was spoilt by having to get real

jobs in order to pay bills and eventually even (gasp) a mortgage of

my own, but I always seem to have just about clung on to the life

less-ordinary that I hoped for as a youngster.

All this became somewhat easier when I landed a job where I

was actually paid to ride motorcycles. Not just that, but paid quite

well too. Who’d have thought it possible? It did mean that

sometimes I’d have to do things on a bike that required the odd risk

– odd usually being the word – but as I’d grown up reading exciting

adventure books, the feeling I was taking a bit of a risk every now

and then just added to the excitement of doing something a bit out

of the ordinary.

This isn’t a book about how to become a test rider, but instead ittells how I – almost accidentally – became a test rider for what is

probably England’s most famous motorcycle manufacturer, and of

the many strange situations I’ve found myself involved in as a

result. As such, I suppose it is about as close as you are going to get

to a book about how to be a Test Rider, and, particularly, what you

might expect. But I hope you’ll find the stories a bit more ‘human’

than that. After all, however professional people try to make

themselves appear, I love the way the human element often quicklyengages to make things go ever-more pear-shaped...

Amongst these motorbike stories you’ll also find some of the

other things I’ve been getting up to ‘in the background’ whilst I’ve


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been working as a test rider. Music and cars are two of my other

favourite pastimes and have always gone hand in hand with bikes.

You’ll find some of my best friends in these pages too, which, as

I’m an Englishman, does of course include dogs. Every one of my

adopted kids happens to have four legs and comprise of not just ofthe aforementioned dogs, but also goats and sheep, and the story of

how this rather unusual situation occurred at the end of what

seemed like a normal day twenty years ago, is told as a warning to

you all!

Even though I’m now privileged and lucky enough to be paid to

ride the very latest, fastest and most advanced motorcycles in the

world for a living, I must admit to being a bit of a dinosaur in my

outlook on modern day life. I don’t have much regard for ultra-modern technology, fast-paced living and keeping up with fashions

and fads and the like. It’s been suggested by my colleagues that I’ve

become a silly old duffer before my time – and they may have a

point, but at least I’m a silly old duffer who’s done a bit – and it’s

that ‘ bit’ that I hope you’ll enjoy sharing with me by reading this

effort of mine, that blows the lid off the little-known and secretive

world of motorcycle development test-riding, and attempts to put

into words for (as far as I’m aware) the first time ever, what it’sreally like to be a factory Test Rider.


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When I Grow Up

The whole machine was alive with an electrical-like buzz, as the

massive buffeting turbulence and vibration shook my head aroundon my shoulders as if I were an Action Man doll. The sliced air

stream rushing around my taped-down visor drowned out the

tormented mechanical howl of the screaming engine and I glanced

down for a split second to try and focus on the rev counter. The

throttle was pinned to the stop. My left toe had taken the weight of

the gear lever and a little more pressure beyond, and just at the

moment that the needle reached the red, I flicked the throttle off a

few degrees and then straight back to the stop. In that instant I feltmy toe take the gear from fifth to sixth in a tidy, seamless, clutch-

less change. Momentarily the machine seemed to hold a constant

speed and then very slowly began accelerating again. I was dead-

centre of the main straight at Bruntingthorpe Airfield and Test

Track, almost at the half-way point where you reach a small rise

that, once passed, suddenly presents the rest of the main straight to

you, looking like a long unfurled grey ribbon. In the heat of the day

a mirage would appear with a row of shimmering red and whitecones seemingly only a few seconds away when travelling at high

speed. These cones showed the right hand turn into the bottom

hairpin that was actually another mile away. This strange quirk of

nature often made me flinch from my concentration as I came over

the rise before my brain caught up with the illusion. At this half way

point there is an adjoining piece of track on the right, linking a

return loop of the circuit, and it was here that the company truck

would be parked, giving the attending mechanic a good view ofalmost the entire circuit. Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight

of the mechanic who had been sent with me. J.P. was no longer

relaxing on the plastic chair where I’d left him half an hour


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previously. He was on the edge of the circuit, waving both arms

madly above his head. Something was wrong. My mind sped

through possible reasons for his panic. Glancing around the small

cockpit I attempted to read the instruments; oil pressure, oil

temperature, water temperature, RPM. I tried to make out the image behind me from the vibrating blur of silver where the mirrors

usually were, to check for smoke. Then just as I came over the rise I

realised what the fuss was about. Two gigantic glaring lights were

approaching me head-on about a hundred feet away, travelling at a

good rate of knots about twenty feet off the ground, and dropping

fast. It was a light twin-engine aircraft coming in to land, and we

were seconds away from collision!

The well-known saying about having your life flash before youat a moment like this might well be true. I usually find though, that

if I have a few seconds of drama whilst riding, I prefer to spend

them trying to save the situation. My reflexes have not often let me

down and I’ve managed on many occasions to gather a motorcycle

back under control from ridiculously precarious situations where it

seems all must be lost. Only when everything happens in an instant

have I found myself sliding along the floor hoping I’m not going to

hit anything hard. An aeroplane is quite hard...I suppose as a schoolboy, amongst the impossible careers you

imagine for yourself when you grow up, being a motorcycle test

rider might nowadays be a bit out of fashion. It featured pretty high

on my list though, amongst the other old favourites; pilot, racing

driver, explorer, secret agent – and if being Brett Sinclaire from

‘The Persuaders’ was a career, then I’d quite like to be him too.

Strangely though, despite idolising Barry Sheene, I never wanted to

race motorbikes. I’d have loved the chance to be a racing driver, butwith bikes, I only ever wanted to be a test rider. That was probably

something to do with my choice of motorcycle books as a kid. They

were always about the history of the manufacturers and how the

machines they created were developed, so I could have wound up a

design engineer I suppose, but that wasn’t heroic enough for my

schoolboy mind to find exciting. One thing was for sure though –

I’d never read anything in my collection of old books about test-

riding leading to this kind of thing...

Our garage at home was an interesting place. Dad had always

ridden motorcycles and there was always something with two

wheels that needed cleaning or fixing. During the time my two


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sisters and I had been around though, he’d had to be content with

owning fairly small capacity machines to commute to work on. We

were not a well-off family, and a cheap-to-run bike to get to and

from work was as much a necessity as a pleasure, but even so, these

were very exciting to me, and started a lifelong interest inmotorbikes, as each one, however small the capacity and value, was

treated as a very special object of desire. Amongst them was a

rather rare gold-coloured CZ 175 in semi-trail bike trim that had a

strange clubby gear lever that doubled-up as a kick start. I

remember dad swapping the original carburettor on this bike for a

British made Amal, the factory of which was just our side of

Birmingham, and so was handy for rebuilds and spares. I was

delighted to find that the arrival of this new carb also required theaddition of an extra chrome lever on the handlebars that worked the

choke. Exciting stuff for little fingers! Then there was a red Honda

CD175 twin that had very deep shapely mudguards and a fully

enclosed chain case. I remember this bike as being quite a squat and

bulky machine for such a ‘tiddler ’. A Suzuki 120 two stroke single

arrived one day as a long term loan bike, from a dealer who’d had

one of dad’s Hondas back for some extensive work under warranty.

For some reason I found this bike fascinating. I may have been particularly keen because it was the first bike he’d had that I could

sit on, touch the ground, and hold up under my own steam. It was

quite an unusual design too that interested me – a bit odd looking

with a pressed steel frame that the engine was bolted to from the

rear of the engine cases, with no other engine mounts or front down

tube whatsoever which allowed the engine to just sit out – as if

floating – in the unobstructed air flow. This was the first bike I’d

seen with a pressed steel frame rather than the more usual tubularframe, which although hardly a new development, (it’d been around

for decades), I thought was quite clever. His very last bike was a

blue Honda ‘Benley’ CD200 four stroke twin, that he’d often pick

me up from school on. This one had been bought from Devimead –

the Honda dealer and BSA specialist whose tiny showroom was

half-way up Wilnecote hill on the A5 near Tamworth, just a mile or

so from our house. This little Honda was only a year old when he

bought it in 1980 and was the newest and shiniest bike he’d ownedsince the 1950s. I can’t imagine any machine that was more

mollycoddled than this one. Every weekend the bike would get

stripped down for a thorough clean, the hot engine getting

thoroughly covered with Gunk from a small tin and stiff thick-


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bristled brush kept especially for the job, while the tank and side

panels waited, sitting on the grass lawn, for their coat of wax. The

smell of that hot Gunk has always stayed with me and is as firmly

embedded in my memory in connection with sunny days and

motorcycles, as is the smell of Castrol R. During winter the little bike was still worked hard on the daily fifty mile commute, and to

help it survive, the frame and all chrome, including the wire wheels,

were liberally coated in Waxoil, which would stay in place until

spring time. The bike looked a right old nail during this period to be

honest, especially the wheels, and I couldn’t wait to help get the

bike cleaned up again in spring time, when it would get an even

more thorough strip down and clean, leaving the sparkly blue and

chrome machine looking better than new.Many Saturday mornings in the 1970s and early 80s were spent

riding out on the pillion with Dad to visit the bike shops along

Stratford Road in Birmingham. There were many to wander around

in the old days, gathered in this one area of the city. You could

spend all day criss-crossing the street to take a look in-turn at each

of the old and tall time-weathered Victorian buildings that were

now the homes of small motorcycle shops or spares suppliers at the

street level. My very favourite of all of these bike shops though,was Vale-Onslow’s. The ancient showroom was always packed

with obscure old machinery and smelt of oil and petrol and fusty

pre-war excitement. The creaky oil-stained wooden floor boards

were well trodden from more than a hundred years of use, and were

covered here and there with worn patterned linoleum, and even this

must have been over half a century old. Light flooded in through the

huge plate-glass display windows that were still of their splendid

and elaborate Victorian vintage, and the ceilings and doorways stillattempted to impress with their ornate carved decoration – a carry-

over from an earlier and more genteel age, and amongst this time

capsule of mingled earlier eras, I can just about remember a young

boy about my own age that was the grandson of the shop owner. He

was a chubby little kid that made a lot of noise as he clambered over

all the bikes and charged around the place jumping off things,

seemingly with no sense of any potential danger. The shop itself

was owned by Len Vale-Onslow, who in the 1920s and 30s hadraced his own machines which he called The Super Onslow Special,

or, as it said on the petrol tank, simply, SOS. I suppose it was

unusual for a schoolboy to be up to speed with the history of Len


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and his SOS, but I was. I knew all about his unusual Villiers based

water-cooled two stroke engines, and the fact that he was the first

person to design and fabricate high-level exhausts.

I knew all about Len and SOS because of a strange twist of fate

that ultimately had a great bearing on my future and perhaps wasthe fundamental grounding that inspired me to try and become a test

rider many years later. During that period my uncle and auntie had

been living in Nigeria, having moved there with my uncle’s job. He

held a lofty position with Dunlop, and a few years before had been

involved in the development of Dunlop’s latest ‘World Beater

Tyres’. As a rather expensive promotional gimmick, the company

fitted a set of these new tyres to a car and had them driven twice

around the world without being replaced. The chap that drove thecar was my uncle, Ken Austin and my Auntie Irene went along too.

The vehicle chosen for the trip was a rather nice metallic brown

Hillman Hunter Estate, and he brought it over for us to see before

setting off. This was followed by months of postcards and letters

from exotic locations from all around the world which, in my young

enquiring mind, began a wanderlust that never left me. My uncle

was also a motorcycle enthusiast. He’d owned a Rudge, a couple of

Matchless’ and three Ariel Square Fours amongst others. Later on,in his new job out in Africa, he couldn’t get hold of his favourite

magazine, ‘Classic Bike’, so asked my mom and dad to buy it for

him and keep the copies to be collected when he made the trip home

once or twice a year. This suddenly gave me access to reading

material I would never have dreamed of looking at previously, and I

became fascinated by these old bikes and their manufacturers, many

of which were long gone before I was born, so I suppose that’s what

started off my interest in motorcycle development. My favouritecontributors to the magazine were Alan Cathcart and Dave Minton

and I eagerly awaited each month’s edition to read about their test

riding exploits on the many vintage and classic machines. This

fuelled my interest even more, from the descriptions of the handling

and ability of the bikes and I took things further by searching

everywhere I could think of to find old books and magazines – the

older the better, such as the period British magazines, popularly

known as, ‘The Blue Un’ and ‘The Green Un’, (The Motorcycle,and Motorcycling ), which filled my own motorcycling vocabulary

with words and phrases I’ve been stuck with using ever since; I

prefer to use the term, ‘motorcycle’ or ‘machine’. Also, the


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‘machine’ has a ‘saddle’, definitely not a ‘seat’, and most

importantly I am a ‘motorcyclist’ and never a ‘ biker ’!

At about the age of twelve, it seemed that my friends and I were

all suddenly developing an even greater interest in motorcycles at

the same time, especially where dirt bikes were concerned. Two brothers who were school mates of mine had talked their parents

into buying them a field bike to play with on the bit of rough ground

around a big lake at the end of our road. At the time, none of us had

any idea what the strange little 80cc Suzuki had been originally, but

it was a cool-looking little dirt bike now that fired our imaginations.

Years later I found out that far from being a home-built field bike,

this little Suzuki was in fact an almost completely standard and

incredibly rare K11t – Suzuki’s first ever off road trail bike from1963, and perhaps the very last one in existence in Britain even

then.

A few months later the older brother left school and started an

apprenticeship that enabled him to buy a brand-new air-cooled

Yamaha DT175 which was (and strangely still is) one of the most

exciting things I’d ever seen. This became his daily transport and

their new dirt toy at weekends and they offered to let me have their

old Suzuki for just £15 if I wanted it. Easter was just around thecorner and I managed to talk my parents into buying me the little

machine for an Easter present instead of chocolate. It still amazes

me to this day that I was allowed to have it!

Soon after, I remember sitting astride my new pride and joy in

my school uniform and dirty shoes, with no helmet or gloves, and

Dad standing alongside me explaining how things worked. I pulled

the clutch lever to the bar and Dad stomped the gear lever into first,

I engaged the clutch, gave her a bit of throttle and spun the rear

wheel up with a cloud of dirt. I was off.


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The World

s a Stage

The year 1982 brought my sixteenth birthday and I was able to buy

my first 50cc road bike. A moped known as a Honda Express was purchased from a neighbour for £100 and suddenly my world

opened up. I thought the little machine would go faster if I took the

basket off the handlebars and this also improved the looks and

aerodynamics considerably. I also found that whilst riding down the

local Polesworth Hill at full-chat, I could back off the throttle very

slightly and starve the engine of fuel, thus making the engine ‘race’.

Sometimes I could get as much as 31 or 32mph! Of course, what I

would have liked to have owned at this time was the dream of everysixteen year old bike nut of the period – either a Honda SS50, or,

better still, a Yamaha FS1E. These bikes had to have pedals to be

legally recognised as a moped (which was part of the strange

learner laws in the UK at the time), but these pedals folded up out

of the way and so the whole thing looked like a ‘real’ motorbike.

Around school, legend had it that in the right hands an FS1E was

capable of maybe 45, or even 50mph, especially with some special

tuning mods to the silencer and carb, but unfortunately I was neverto find out if my hands were the right hands, and I remember being

able to keep up with one on my Honda Express one day, so perhaps

I would have been a bit disappointed after all…

I’d had a couple of ‘off-road’ dirt bikes by this time including an

MZ TS250 that I rebuilt from boxes of bits to create my own ISDT

lookalike. I was too young to ride these on the road though, so a

moped it was, until the following year when at the age of seventeen,

I was allowed by law to ride a 125cc, 12hp machine. I’d developed

quite a soft spot for East German MZs after my TS rebuild, and as it

happened, a brand new MZ TS125 could be bought at Devimead’s

new huge showroom – half a mile further down the road from the


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old one – for just £399. That was for the deluxe version too, which

they called the ‘Alpine’, which had such luxuries as chrome panels

fitted to the sides of the petrol tank! I bought the best one they’d got

in the shop on the ‘never-never ’ at £18 a month, which included a

bright blue waterproof one piece over-suit, a red crash helmet whichI think was made by a company called Laser, and a pair of rubber

Derry boots. I must have looked quite a catch – you can imagine…

A174 XOC was an Alpine version in silver. How I loved that bike. I

went everywhere on it, even camping in Wales. My mates thought I

was mad as they’d all managed to raise the money to buy Japanese

125’s, but these were out of the reach of my pocket – at more than

three times the price and so I consoled myself in the knowledge that

I knew of MZ’s fantastic racing heritage, although this fell on deafears where my mates were concerned. They laughed a lot when I

told them that Suzuki’s racing two-stroke technology had all come

from MZ...

The only thing I loved as much as my bike was my Fender

Telecaster. I’d been playing guitar in bands since I was fourteen and

by the time I’d got my new MZ at seventeen, my band at the time –

‘Sitting Pretty’, had just released a single (remember those round

vinyl things?) and were doing pretty well. We were often featuredin the local press and had a large following of teenage-girls (the

screaming schoolgirl variety) in our home town. We’d also been

promised a feature as an up-and-coming group in the well-known

girly teenager magazine, ‘Just 17’. For this reason I’d decided not to

follow my dad’s footsteps into the RAF, even though I’d been keen

on this direction for years. I thought dad would be upset about this,

but it turned out he was quite chuffed that when we walked around

town together I’d sometimes get asked for autographs. I can see hisface now – beaming! He even went on tour with one of my bands

one summer, driving one of the two van loads of equipment along

the south coast of the UK and around the Isle of Wight for us. I was

anxious not to tie myself up in something that I couldn’t get out of

when the ‘inevitable’ offer arrived from a record company, and for

this reason, as well as deciding against an RAF career I’d also

decided not to bother applying to Art College either, which was

another option I’d been considering when I left school. I did,however, land a job designing logos, lettering and artwork with a

small company in town – a position I’d attained using my school art

folder to impress and was the sort of job I might have been offered


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if I had gone to art school. This, rightly or wrongly, made me feel

like I’d saved myself three years of college – an eternity when

you’re that age. Later on, I got interested in photography too, and

trained with a wedding photographer briefly, before settling on

portraiture as a favourite subject. I’ve continued with this on and offover many years since as a side-line to earn a bit of extra cash

whenever I was desperate, even shooting the odd wedding every

now and then, though photographing weddings – as lucrative as this

was – was never really an ‘arty’ enough occupation for me to want

to take it up full-time.

As the 1980s went on, nothing in life much mattered except

guitars (mainly vintage ones), motorcycles, (also mainly vintage

and classic ones), my bands (up to the minute, and as far as I wasconcerned, the best thing you’d have ever heard), and, my latest

passion, cars. This latest obsession with motorcars was the start of

another life-long affair that over the years has bought much joy,

despite occasionally causing desperation during breakdowns,

especially through the very many years of cash-strapped struggling.

But this desperation and lack of funds almost went hand in hand, as

it meant I gained a few mechanical skills and an ability to ‘sniff-

out’ cheap spares...Dad started teaching me to drive from about the age of fifteen in

our family car at that time, a yellow Ford Capri 1600XL of 1972

vintage. By the time I got my provisional licence to enable the

purchase of my Honda Express at that magical age of sixteen, I was

driving that Capri with L plates fitted every time we went out as a

family, including all the way to our caravan in Tywyn near

Aberdovey in Mid Wales. Also, as it happened, my best friend at

the time, a chap called Pete Long, who was also the bass player inSitting Pretty, had already passed his driving test. This meant that I

could drive our family car if he sat in the passenger seat at the same

time as long as I kept ‘L plates’ on the car. I lose track of how many

gigs we travelled to like this, when we weren’t travelling in one of

his own old Morris Marinas. He liked Marinas for some reason (if

you don’t already know, bass players are always a bit odd!), and

had three or four of them over the space of a couple of years in

those sunny and colourful days during the mid-1980s. This meantthough, that just before I reached seventeen I was able to apply for

my driving test, and just a couple of weeks after reaching that

minimum UK driving age, I took and passed my test at the first


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attempt. This was quickly followed by the excitement of buying my

very own car. This car, though, should have given me a clue as to

my destiny with regard to personal taste in practically all my

motorcars from this point on – that I was destined to follow dreams

rather than sensibilities! On a trip out to visit my Nan inBirmingham, we drove past a used car dealer where I spotted a little

red two seat sports car that made my heart skip a beat as we went

by. I left mom and dad at my Nan’s house and went back to have a

closer look. It was a 1969 Tartan red MG Midget Mk3. The sills

had rotted through on both sides, the carpet was thread bare, the

floor pan – which was clearly visible through the holes in the carpet

– was crumbling rust and directly below the foot-peddles was a hole

in that floor pan that you could have passed a rugby ball through.The stitching was coming apart on the leather seats, which, along

with the leather rim steering wheel – were turning powdery white

with mould and a sign in the windscreen stated in bold letters,

‘SOLD AS SEEN’. It was love at first sight. Looking back now,

that little MG was a recipe for disaster, and indeed, in the end it

certainly was, but it taught me an awful lot about car mechanics. To

this day I’m still enthralled by MGs, and Midgets of all eras

especially, despite the fact that I’m of rather larger stature than Iwas back then... The Mk3 of ‘66-’74 used the famous and long-

lived A Series 1275cc engine from Austin. This push-rod, overhead

valve engine was the same as the one fitted to the legendary Mini

Cooper S, including the sporty twin carb set up, but was slightly

detuned from the Cooper S spec. This leaves plenty of scope for the

keen home-tuner to do some ‘fettling’ in that true MG fashion. The

wonderful thing about MGs for me is that despite their fantastic

racing heritage and pedigree that mixes-it with names such asGoldie Gardener and George Eyston, they remained so

unpretentious. It was the sports car for the working man – if you

like, or perhaps, like the Mini, it was a ‘classless’ motorcar, loved

by the wealthy and the hard-up alike and considered a national

treasure by a good deal of car enthusiasts in the Britain that existed

in the mid twentieth century. Certainly, for me, as the years have

gone by, and I’ve found myself a member of various exotic car

clubs where I didn’t mix comfortably with the other owners (asopposed to enthusiasts) this appeal has just become more attractive,

and as a result there have been several more MGs through my hands

in the last twenty years. If you can excuse me reminiscing about

four-wheeled vehicles for a little while longer, that first drive home


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in this car was a life changing experience. The dealer insisted on

one of his mechanics driving because the car was on the garage’s

trade plates, but I accompanied in the passenger seat. I’ll never

forget the B road from Kingsbury to Tamworth that was taken flat

out, as I peered over the drivers left arm to try and take a look at thespeedometer, which hovered backwards and forwards shakily

around the 100mph mark. After the sharp S bend through the

railway tunnel at the village of Piccadilly, the throttle was pinned

once more to the floor – or where the floor used to be – and the little

MG twisted and twitched its rear end as it scurried onto the straight,

the steering wheel quickly writhing left and right in the driver ’s

hands in small corrections. Flat out in second all the way to the red

line, flat out in third to the red line, into fourth – foot flat on thefloor again. The engine screamed and the hood flapped madly

against the hood frame. Wind noise howled past the thick

aluminium screen pillars and the little twin S.U carbs gasped for air

noisily – their mouths wide open like hungry chicks. If this was all

happening now I’d probably be furious at the bloke for driving my

new car like that, but at that time, and at that age it was terrific. I

suppose it was just as well though, as the introduction to old sports

cars and MGs especially, perhaps couldn’t have been more in-keeping or inspiring for a seventeen year old. As for that famous

MG slogan though; ‘Safety Fast’ – I doubt it!

A few months later a 1972 Ford Cortina Estate (in a shade of

brown that was very out of fashion at that time, but would look

good again today) was bought, as it was obvious my MG was going

to take quite a good deal of work before the dreaded MOT was

booked. This car cost me £250 – which was £100 less than I’d paid

for my rusting MG. The car was particularly useful though forcarrying my amplifiers around to gigs and rehearsals, and for a long

time my huge Vox amplifier became an almost permanent feature of

the boot where it was left at all other times due to its size and

weight. After sliding this Cortina into the back of another car at

some traffic lights in heavy rain and writing it off, (I was 17

remember!), I found a rare 1300 Fiat called a 3p Berlinetta Coupe

(3p referring to the Italian – tre-porte – or three-door). This revy

little sports flier was so much fun, especially as it was a bit quickerthan the trendy fast Fords of the era, the XR2 and XR3, which, (I’m

now ashamed to say), I’d like to go hunting for.

AMOS, Julian - Test Rider the True Motorcycling Adventures of a Secret Development Test Rider

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Transcript of AMOS, Julian - Test Rider the True Motorcycling Adventures of a Secret Development Test Rider