Our stay at the Chateau was soaked in beer and wine and washed each night by a little summer rain. The Black Bullet lived under Norm’s spare groundsheet when she wasn’t ferrying me about. I didn’t take a spare lid, I decided in the end to minimise stress on the old girl by refusing to take passengers. All-in-all this seemed like the right decision after the clutch started giving me gip.
It’s traditional to take lunch in old Le Mans on the Saturday afternoon, shortly before the start of the race. On this occasion, being free to suit myself, I scoffed a plate of steak frites and headed off to the circuit to buy a ticket. So simple in the re-telling but my plan was scuppered by the Le Mans one-way system. Convoluted and impenetrable and shot through with intersections diaboliques, pretty soon I was as clueless as my compass.
Then, at a particularly mean set of lights, glaring balefully out over five lanes of rev-happy traffic, the bike started crawling forward all of its own accord. I pulled the clutch lever tight to the bar but she just kept pulling so I dropped anchor and stalled, in gear, just as the lights turned green. The traffic boiled around me and as it beeped and scraped by I heard a hollow heckler's laugh. Why do people do that?
The bike was stuck and the clutch lever had gone limp but somehow it slipped out of gear as I strained to push it to the pavement. In retrospect, I might have decompressed the cylinder and pusher her off the street but I didn't think of that at the time.
Once out of immediate danger I pulled off my clobber, both panicked and annoyed, suspecting a split cable. At least I had the replacement in my backpack, so all was not yet lost. It wasn’t until I crouched down by the gearbox that I realised I didn’t have a spanner to loosen the adjuster. The worst of it was I’d planned to travel at all times with my small adjustable but I’d just never got round to digging it out of my box of bits, which was back at the campsite.
It had finally happened. I’d broken down by the side of the road far from home, and the natives were laughing at me. Everybody had probably been waiting for this moment and soon they would know they were right. What a stupid idea it was taking a knackered old machine abroad anyway, would I ever learn? I tugged on the end of the offending cable disconsolately, expecting it to slip out of its sleeve. It felt strangely tight. I stood up and waggled the lever which caused the gearbox end to slide in and out, like the connection was still good.
“Something’s not right here,” I murmured, looking more closely at the lever. It was then that I saw the cable sleeve had jumped out of its slot, so there was nothing for the lever to pull against. Slotting it back in returned full operation to the linkage, even though it still felt a bit wooden. Only an immense amount of play in the cable would allow this to happen, like if I let the lever out but the clutch remained disengaged. Could it be soggy clutch springs, or a severely sticking cable perhaps? Something was amiss but at least it looked as though I had what I needed to get going again.
"Forget the circuit," I thought, suddenly relieved. "I'll push the bike out of this insane one way system and back onto the main drag, then I'll head back to the Chateau to address the situation with a full set of tools." The race would be starting in a couple of hours. I could watch it on the terrace at the Chateau, with an ice cold beer in my hand, nice and civilised. It was a bun fight at the circuit at the start anyway. I shrugged my jacket back on and thanked my lucky stars. We lived to fight again.
