A View From the Chair
A View From the Chair
Carnival owners have known for a long time that people will pay good money to sit in small, bullet-shaped containers that provide an exaggerated sense of speed, and it may be that sidecar makers have tapped a more complex strain of the same weakness. When Steve Kimball returned from Side Strider with a black, English-made Watsonian sidecar bolted to a GS750 test bike, it was hard to look at the thing without wanting to sit in it. Once seated, I found the temptation to go somewhere irresistible. Kimball asked if I wanted to ride to the Brass Monkey Sidecar Rally, held high in the wintery mountains of Arizona the following weekend. I can’t remember the exact reply, but it was something from my large stock of what-the-hell-you-only-live-once answers.
Even for someone who is over six feet tall, the Watsonian is remarkably comfortable to sit in. The seat back is set at a slightly reclining angle and the bottom cushion is padded for good thigh support. Knees fit in the raised portion of the fiberglass that forms the windshield cowl. There is a footrest board at the front of the floor so feet and ankles don’t have to rest at awkward angles inside the bulletshaped nose. Inner side panels of vinylcovered fiberboard give good hip support. Like a good sports car, it provides just enough room for comfort, but not enough that you can rattle around or slam into things during hard cornering.
The passenger can look either through or over the Sopwith Camel windscreen, depending on whether he sits bolt upright or hunkers down a bit. Our Watsonian came with a convertible top, complete with frame, stowed in the trunk. This fits snugly and looks very sporting, but works best for persons who are shorter than 6foot-1. We erected the thing with me sitting helmetless in the sidecar, and when the last snap was snapped my head strained against the canvas like the tallest pole at the big top. Short of doing a swan dive into a dry swimming pool or hanging around the nearest nuclear facility, I couldn’t contrive any way to get smaller. Rain or shine, it was top down motoring.
Being a sidecar passenger on thçy straight, open road is very relaxing. You can’t steer, lean, make suggestions or do anything else that has the slightest effect on your destiny, so you learn to leave it all in the hands of the driver (capable or otherwise) and gaze contentedly at the scenery. The only semi-useful role is to makej an occasional study of the nuts and bolts holding the chair to the motorcycle and watch for looseness while wondering who tightened them in the first place. There is a sort of useless, helpless lump feeling to being a passenger in a sidecar. Maybe it’s just knowing you can be replaced by a bag of groceries, a case of Budweiser or a largè’ German Shepherd with its tongue hanging out. On the other hand, I’ve never been on any other motorcycle ride where I could nod off and take a short nap while someone else did all the work.
If the chair weren’t so comfortable, it might be harder to sleep. But I’ve nevtV» spent a full day as comfortably seated in any vehicle; car, truck, motorcycle, bus, plane or otherwise. The Watsonian was such a snug, painless fit I almost hated to get out, even at gas stops. No sore back, numb butt or stiff neck. The only hurdle to complete serenity was wind noise around the helmet. Holding a hand up on either side of the windscreen made the noise go away, so if we’d had time to install a simple set of clear plastic wind wings, MGTC style, the ride would be perfect.
Peter Egan
In the mountains the passenger’s role becomes more active. It helps in cornering to transfer your weight this way and that as the rig alternately tries to skitter and understeer or lift you off the pavement. It was a lot of fun, careening upward on the narrow, winding Arizona mountain roads into snow country, sliding on the patches of water and sand and ice, narrowly missing large potholes or crumbling stone retaining walls and smashed Armco on precipitous cliff-side corners, and passing cattle trucks with short bursts of power that skewed the car sideways and braking into blind corners that threw the car the other way. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride has nothing on a mountain sidecar trip with Steve Kimball at the helm.
Not until the following day when we swapped places and I drove the rig myself for the first time did I realize that (a) sidecars are nearly impossible to steer on mountain roads, (b) we were lucky to be alive, and (c) Kimball is never to be trusted again. I still don’t know how he did it. And to think I was having a good time.
We had a nice visit at the rally and campground, and a scenic (despite rain and snow) eight-hour mountain ride getting out of Arizona. We crossed into California at sundown. At a gas stop Steve informed me that once he crosses the California border, the rest of the ride is “just like pulling into the driveway.”
Great. Just what I needed after a full day of wind and buffeting in a sidecar. A 250-mile driveway. Across the Great California Desert. Steve Kimball loves to suffer. His parents spanked him once when he was bad and twice when he was good, as nearly as I can figure, and he has been conditioned to associate suffering with virtue.
So, we spent another four or five hours pulling into the driveway, the sidecar hurtling through the desert night like a cruise missile with four inches of ground clearance. I put on an Apple Warmer and every article of clothing available, covered my knees grandma-style with a wool army blanket and snapped the tonneau cover tightly around my jacket(s). I tried to sleep but was constantly distracted by close-up inspections of truck tires and the undersides of semi-trailers, all the while enjoying a closer than normal relationship with road kill. Sometime during the night we really did pull into my driveway.
In retrospect (after 18 hours of sleep), it was fun and I’d do it again. Somehow a sidecar manages, as only a few other vehicles do, to make any road travel feel like an adventure. Looking back on a 700 mi. weekend trip, it’s like a wild carnival ride where you accidentally bought the hundred dollar ticket instead of the twentyfive-center. EB
