Ago & Friends
AGO & FRIENDS
Up the Coastest with the Mostest
JOHN BURNS
WELL, IT REALLY VERY nearly was the last straw when the server at Ventana brought Alain's oysters after his main course at lunch. I mean, we'd already ridden over an hour-and-a-half that morning and were completely shagged by the time we got to Big Sur after all the wine and food at Frank's compound last night, and now this. What else could go wrong? Why do I let myself be talked into things like this?
I had really planned to wash my hair and rinse a few things out that week, when the e-mail man came with this bright idea: Ride new MV Agustas up the Pacific Coast with Giacomo Agostini and Phil Read for five days to the Ritz-Carlton at Half Moon Bay for the big Legends of the Motorcycle confab, where MV would be the featured marque and Giacomo would receive some sort of lifetime achievement award. It sounded perfectly dreadful, but all
the Cycle World regulars already had less strenuous things to do, so I picked up the MV Agusta 312 1078 at the CW offices and got ready to roll. Frankly, things had not been going so well for me lately: The Ferrari fouled another plug, my best poio pony's down with gout, the roof needs reslating... Dammit, I deserved a vacation.
What a cruel machine the MV is, with ergonomics, as my friend Minime once noted, more suited to one’s first day in prison than for riding a motorcycle. Then I rode around on it a little and changed my mind. The 190-horsepower engine in the thing has you forgiving it a lot of failings, and the “heated” seat’s nice, too. Perhaps I could get suitably trained servants to rub Ben-Gay on my rear end along the way?
Also, we’d be taking three days to get where I normally ride in one, so things were looking up.
Let’s see, that’s two world champions so far and me; Agostini with, like, 15 titles, and Read with seven or eight. And Eraldo Ferracci is vice president of Cagiva USA, MV importer, so he’s along for the ride, too-and you’re forgiven for not knowing that in addition to his tuning talent, Eraldo was 1959 and 1964 Italian 125cc champ. He was 110 pounds then but otherwise just the same beautiful human as ever. Rounding out our group is Alain de Cadenet, master of ceremonies for the Legends event, provider of our own little “Victory by Design” episode at every stop (one of the bestever old-car shows if you haven’t seen it) and a man with a powerful need to blow a big hole in the MV Agusta expense account. I’m down with that.
Ithink they've trained them not to say it anymore, but I used to watch with glee as the AMA roadracing stars would occasionally blurt out, "Oh, I'd never ride a street bike, they're waaay too dangerous. . ." It was fun to see the PR guys' nostrils palpitate from the sudden blood-pressure spike. In the Read/Ago days, things were different. For one thing, they raced on the streets half the time. The Isle of Man was in fact the biggest GP on the calendar-until a good friend of Ago's was killed there and Giacomo said never again. A few years later, the Island was off the calendar. Now that these guys are legends, I really expected this little coastal jaunt to be more of a parade lap.
Oh, how wrong you can be. While I was looking incred ibly swank in my crinkly new Dainese gear, multi-time world champ Read was ready to roll in some brown Hush Puppies and holey jeans apparently purchased during the Summer of Love. (Too many bags to hustle through the airport, Phil said.) And here's Ago, the man himself, in a Dainese leather jacket, jeans and some scuffed up brown boots from an old "Then Came Bronson" epi sode. Say, that's just how we used to roll before “riding gear” became its own industry.
And then a funny thing happened. We started riding some nice little canyons through Malibu for a warm-up, and everybody’s a kid again. Read was bom January 1, 1939, Ago’s 65 and Ferracci will be 70 by the time you read this (Happy BD, Eraldo!), but with the mechanical assistance a bike provides, everybody might as well be 20. The high-zoot MV Agusta F4s and Brutales might as well be old Honda 50s or whatever, and Ago and Phil and Eraldo might as well be your old riding buds from when you were a kid (especially since none of us are much taller than your friends were when you were 12).
Thankfully, people of our socioeconomic status tend to stop along the way more often than your typical maze-scurrying rodent, mostly because we can afford to, thanks. In Joe’s Café on State Street in Santa Barbara, I ingest a slab of pink prime rib that almost sends my old Cycle magazine boss Phil Schilling (who popped in ’cause he lives there) into another coronary episode just from proximity. Sorry, Phil. State Street’s a nice place to people-watch if you like ’em rich and beautiful, and oh, here comes Virgil Elings on his bike to lead the way to our next stop-his motorcycle museum/collection up the road in Solvang. Virgil’s transpo? Oval-piston Honda NR750, why not?
Virgil’s got a few bucks rattling around from the looks of things, and he’s also got a 1967 RC-181 Honda that Mike Hailwood rode to victory against Agostini (which later wins a first place at the show we’re headed to). Virgil has in mind to get Ago to write “My View” on the tailsection and autograph it. Ago declines the inscription but graciously signs the tail anyway.
Later, I ask Ago if he’s got a bike collection? “No. I have one MV in a room with some trophies and leathers, a few photos. My museum is here,” he says, tapping his head with an index finger and looking just like that cool guy in all the Fellini movies.
I’m sure Ago must have a few skeletons in his closet, but the Ago now on display is the picture of domestic bliss and contentment. (His wife, Maria, and kids are vacationing along in a van.) Coming up with interesting questions for Ago, for me anyway, is as tough as interviewing the Pope or Dalai Lama or somebody. Father, can we know perfection?
Not you, my son. Go now and bug me no more...
I did, of course, ask him the same question everybody asks. Ago, who is the best of all time?
“Me.”
Are the bikes too easy to ride now?
“Of course. All this traction control...”
“ But Ago, didn’t lots of riders get, ahhh, killed during your era?
“Well (sighs), that is true. Today in a GP season, if there are 50 or 60 crashes there is maybe a broken bone or two. In those days, if there were 50 or 60 crashes there were also two or three deaths. At Francorchamps one year, I come upon a crash that has just happened, a Frenchman named Christian Ravel:
Over here is the body (gestures with his right hand), over here is the head (gestures with the left)...”
Agostini is too cool, with nothing left to prove to any body. Read, on the other hand, is not exactly pissed off but he's not fully gruntled, either. A rider of the highest caliber, Phil happened to be sandwiched between a pair of G.O.A.T.s-Ago and Mike Hailwood. Virgil’s museum fills with the scent of unfinished business.
“You’re welcome,” Phil says to Ago when their lines intersect in front of a certain Yamaha racer. “What?” Ago feigns ignorance and poor English skills. The details are an article in themselves no doubt, but something to do with Ago winning the 1975 500cc title on a Yamaha, barely defeating Read’s MV. Something about Phil having done a lot of development work for Yamaha before Ago defected there from MV. Something about, Phil says, if not for that electrical problem in Finland, the season would’ve ended differently. Oh, but what about my broken chain, says Ago, when I was 10 seconds ahead of everyone? And something about money.. .as in, Ago always got all of it. Three decades later, the acrimony still smells springtime fresh. We’re soaking in it now.
Meanwhile, Ferracci is having a great time checking out the old Guzzis. “Eh, looka this-a, it’s a DONDOLEENDA!” What are Grecian urns to me are the bikes Eraldo rode as a kid and wrenched on after the war in Italy. Tough times after the war, eh, Eraldo, I venture.
“Eh? Not so much-a. I made three or four thousand a month fixing motorcycles for the British and American soldiers!” Eraldo, it seems, was an entrepreneur before the word was invented. Smart man...
Where Agostini seems happily retired, Read still races a Moto Paton in historic events every chance he gets (and won LeMans two weeks after this ride). Agostini came from money.
Read came from a British couple who took their honeymoon on a pair of motorcycles.
And while Ago’s father discouraged his racing, Read’s old friend Malcolm Clube (also in fine form at Half Moon Bay) says Read’s mother pretty much insisted little Phil take up the cudgels. And it sounded like a pretty good deal to Phil, too, who was working as an apprentice in an appliance factory when he took off for the Isle of Man and shocked everybody by winning the 1961 Junior TT on his first attempt. “That was it,” says Phil. “I made more in prize money for that one race than I’d have made in a yearand-a-half at the factory. And I told my boss that’s it, I’m done here.”
Later on, when Phil needed a van to transport himself and a pair of bikes on an Italian campaign, Clube was the man who sold it to him. Malcolm delivered the van to Phil’s mum’s house as requested, asked her for train fare to get back to London-then, of course, pocketed the money and hitchhiked home. Still good for a laugh four decades later. And though you don’t get to be world champion seven times without a lot of natural talent, Phil’s apprenticeship at the appliance factory and an inventive brain stood him in good stead over the years. It was his idea, Phil says, to make the first magnesium wheels. “I gave Roberto Marchesini a pair of shoes to cast the first set for me. His (old shoes) were full of holes and leaking during a particularly rainy winter. The rest is his tory; we've been friends ever since."
Motorcycles are just like bicycles in that once you learn to ride, you never forget. And once you learn to ride like these guys, well... Naturally, the street is no racetrack, and Ago is at first content to tour along at the rear of the pack, and you sort of think his bike should have a Lexan enclosure like the Popemobile. Read rides up front; he’s a little more impatient. And when we do come to the occasional deserted stretch of road now and then, these guys revert to what made them legends. There’s no crazed gear-shifting or amateurish kneejabbing. They’re just there one second, and the next they’re smoothly gone around the corner in a tight little minnowpack. Ferracci, a man you’d expect to see driving a Buick badly from beneath a low fedora if you didn’t know him, sets a pace on his Brutale on Highway 1 ’s curves that a lot of riders would have a hard time matching. Or maybe it’s just me?
On Old Creek Road, a promiscuous little tramp of dirty pavement that climbs through some hills just east of Highway 1,1 knew Phil was serious when he tucked his jeans into his blue socks. In his current guise, Phil looks like a guy who should be about to retire from stocking shelves at the Piggly Wiggly. Instead, he’s flying down this tight little road on a 190-horsepower MV Agusta, never moving much from straight up-and-down in the seat, and it is not at all easy to keep up on a road he’s never seen before in his life and I’ve been on a bunch of times. I blame the prime rib.
Then we turn off Old Creek Road onto California 46, which has to be one of the most beautiful stretches of road on this planet as it crests a green coastal ridge under scattered white clouds and begins draining in big, smooth fresh-paved sweepers with wide-open sight lines toward the Pacific, a road to make you pity the poor saps who don’t ride motorcycles. I keep it down to a not-too-illegal speed for awhile. Then I look in the mirror and think to myself the sort of thought that so often leads to trouble: What the damn hell. I’m on a free MV Agusta on an empty road. Behind me are Phil Read, Eraldo Ferracci and Giacomo Agostini. Damn the torpedoes, give me
the damn ticket (or even better, give one of them behind me the ticket...). I put my chinbar on the Brutale’s tank and settle into an autobahn-appropriate pace. The snout of Read’s 312 is as usual right on my wing. And a few miles later when I’m thinking it doesn’t get much better than this, there’s a sudden snarl as Ago flashes by on the $120,000 Claudio Castiglioni MV 312, tucked in and doing his best back-in-theday Mistral Straight imitation (the main difference being that back in the day, even the factory MV Agustas didn’t go as fast as the CC MV Agusta does now), and when we pull over a couple of miles later, Ago’s sporting an eyeport-filling grin. Haha!
"Holy-a moley!" says Eraldo. Near dusk one night on Highway 101,
it was starting to get a little brisk, and we were getting a bit impatient behind two lanes of slow-moving cars. I squeezed my Brutale up to the front to see what was the matter, when to my amazement there arose such a clatter. It was some chopper guys, Jesse James wannabes, shooting photos of their bikes in the right lane from their big trailer-towing chase vehicle in the left one. Very thoughtful. When the photographer lowered his lens, I scooted on past, and Phil scooted past me a bit quicker on his 312. Ah, open road at last, on that stretch that looks like the pavement’s infused with diamonds when the light is right.
Unfortunately, we had unwittingly run afoul of the chopper code: Seconds later, one of the chops came flying past Phil and me, tapped out in top cog at about 90 and weaving slightly, possibly due to all the loose garments and chains and things flapping from the apehangers and forward footpegs. Luckily, just as the idea seemed to dawn on Phil that we might be in some kind of speed contest, there was a puff of smoke, something metal clattered out of the chopper’s exhaust and bounced along the roadway, and the flapping guy peeled off onto the shoulder smoking like a stricken B17 falling back to Earth. I think he was wearing a silk scarf. Phil snapped off a smart salute.
If only I’d had the decency to go back and tell the poor wretch his chopper died for a worthy cause. That’s Phil Read, son, that bike he’s riding is just about the fastest, sweetest motorcycle you can buy for $30,000-and if it makes you feel any better, my own first bike would make even your ridiculous hooptie look like a chariot of the gods. And just look at me now, riding around with champions from half the world and a different era away. Well, it just goes to show you, ahh, something...the infinite power of possibility, maybe. So chin up, little dead-chopper dude! Get right back on that pantomime horse!
Well, I tried to be on my best behavior the whole time but just the same, this one was truly a peak motorcycle experience. And the only way you’d know you were riding with a bunch of old-guy champions was this: Their turnsignals were on the whole damn time, I kid you not. □
