| Moto Fest Last weekend was Moto Fest, the official grand opening festival for the new Moto Museum in Grand Center. Our shop was there as a vendor (along with our little group, LouVinMoto), selling t-shirts (available in girls' sizes, and in a wide variety of colors in guys' sizes), and handing out branded shop towels. A friend of ours, Michael Kiernan has a shop on Chouteau at Grand where he deals collector bikes, and the occasional car. Lately, he's been getting incredible stuff, like a Vincent Black Shadow, a Hailwood replica 900SS Ducati, a real Slater brothers Egli Vincent with 15 miles on it, and a certain '73 MV Agusta 750 S. Michael was threatening to make me bump start the MV one morning of the Fest, as its battery was almost dead, and after I ran it up and down the stunt area on the grounds once, he said, "Ah, hell. Just take it out on the street. Don't let the cops catch you, though."
So, I donned my helmet, pulled on my gloves, and wound that beast down Locust at 7:30 am. It sings like no four-cylinder I've ever heard. It's easily the most impressive bike that I've ridden, and not because it's tremendously fast. It is, but that's not it. This thing just has presence - gravitas - sitting there. It's underpowered, overweight and three times more expensive than competitive Japanese machines of the same era, but it easily outclasses them. The fact is, the connection between the 750 S and Gilera/MV's GP-winning bikes of the late '50s and early '60s is incredibly direct. It feels like you're standing next to a proven race bike, of which only 200 were made. It's all original, it all works. And it's $48,000
My experience on the MV alone that morning only compares to one other two-wheeled moment, which also occurred that same weekend, on another bike belonging to the benevolent Mr. Kiernan. In lieu of hauling his bikes back to his shop, I persuaded him to ride them. Great marketing opportunity, starting those things up and having them bellow through the crowd. I selflessly volunteered myself for the task. So, he bumped the MV and I kicked over the Hailwood - a bike made in commemoration of Mike the Bike's return from a ten-year racing retirement to win the grueling Isle of Man TT road race on an outdated Ducati. At this point, a crowd was gathering, and I was saying to myself in the helmet, 'Dontstallit, dontstallit, dontstallit.' We paraded out of the main pedestrian gate, gratuitously blipping the throttles on our open-piped, race-bred, vintage Italian machines and moved slowly onto the street. On a beautiful, expensive (though not as mind-numblingly so as the MV; only $15,000) race-ready bike belonging to someone else, I took it easy as I moved East on Olive St. As I made the turn South onto Compton, I glanced over my right shoulder to see a wild look flash into Michael's eyes through his old Bell helmet, and see his wrist twist the throttle on the high strung MV, bring it up into the power that lives around 9k RPM on that bike, and proceed to overtake me on the outside of the corner. I took this as a sign. The Ducati's torque made quick work of the lead that Michael had put on me, and as he was dancing on the gearshift trying to keep the MV on the cam, I pulled easily alongside him. We exchanged a quick glance, and we both wordlessly agreed that if we were going to do this, we had to do it right: as the bikes crested the hump on the Compton bridge over the railyards and oncoming traffic came into view, we both clicked down a cog, tucked down on the tanks in full racer crouch, and opened the throttles on all six Dell'orto carburetors.
At this point, I was visited by the spirit of Mike the Bike himself. He was proud. Mike's presence, though, distracted me from only one detail I wish I could store in my memory along with the rest from this all-too-short experience: the looks on the faces of the occupants of the oncoming cars. Can you imagine: being in the car, not thinking about much of anything, just getting from A to B on a Sunday afternoon, hearing the sound of...something...something that sounds angry...coming down the road, closing at a high rate of speed, seeing two round headlights with the crowns of full faced helmets peering over them crest the hill and streak past in a blur of intermingled red, green, white and blue, getting full fury of the business end of six open exhaust pipes, maybe hearing the relative whisper of maniacal laughter from the two riders holding the throttle cables taught, and grasping, finally, after about twelve seconds of confusion that something extraordinary just happened.
We stopped at his shop, and if decorum and gentlemanliness hadn't prevented me, I would have kissed him. He made this young man's day, to say the least.
So, all in all, good weekend. The Museum, by the way, is utterly world class.
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