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BOATS, BIKES & AUTOMOBILES

Summer Classic Car Show Photo: Adrian Gillet

by Hamish Goddard

Growing up as a kid, the 2020s were a barely imaginable date in the future, where sci-fi movies presented us with a vision of the dystopian landscapes in which we’d live - the post-apocalyptic world from which Arnie would return as The Terminator to protect a young boy destined to save the human race against The Machines... Wonderful stuff, although now we’ve actually arrived in the 2020s, it doesn’t seem that very much has changed.. Rather than a liquid metal shape-shifting ‘mimetic polyalloy’ T-1000 running around causing havoc, it all looked pretty familiar as Christmas approached, with the usual soundtrack of Mariah Carey, Slade, The Pogues et al, stalking us wherever we went with songs that drive us nuts for a month or so every year. For me - like many others out there - it was also the norm of panic buying as the shops began to close on Christmas Eve, followed by frantic wrapping and the sub-vocalised memo to oneself to be a bit more organised next year. I myself went over to my family in Cornwall, where the local parish had come up with the rather neat idea of holding Midnight Mass at 9 o’clock in the evening in a successful effort to get a few more people - both ancient and modern - through the door. SUPERCAR SANTAS The only festive gift that I managed to buy early was a radio-controlled racing car set for my ‘allocated child’ at the Fundacio Natzaret - a home for orphans and disadvantaged and/or abused children in Palma. This was a truly wonderful initiative from the JoyRon Foundation and organized by the irrepressible local petrolhead Max Gennel, whereby a collection of very special supercars and their Santa-attired owners blasted off for a pre-Christmas drive to the precipitous Santuari de Sant Salvador above Felanitx, before returning to deliver our gifts to some extremely happy faces, awed by the colours and shapes that roared noisily into their otherwise peaceful courtyard - a matching purple McLaren 720S and Lamborghini Aventador SVJ amongst them. Christmas can get a bad rap, perhaps due to the relentless commercialisation of the festival, but this is emphatically what it can

be about - a reason to share joy, happiness and light, particularly to those who find these dispositions otherwise hard to achieve. What an uplifting and enjoyable day for everyone involved and we very much hope that this becomes as much an annual fixture as the overplaying of Mariah Carey.

SA CALOBRA - OUR ISLAND JEWEL

Just prior to swopping Mallorca’s azure sky for the mist and drizzle of the UK in December, we took a collection of fast cars through the ‘Tie-Knot’ - the 720 degree corner at the summit of the Coll del Reis and down the breathtaking piece of road spaghetti that follows to the beach at Sa Colobra - one of the two cul-de-sacs in the island designed and built by the Italian-Spanish road engineer, Antonio Parietti in 1933, the other being the equally gorgeous route linking Puerto Pollença to Cap Formentor. It consistently amazes me that so many long term residents of considerably longer than my four years here have never driven down this absolute

jewel of a road, supposedly designed for tourists but variously described ‘as close as one could get to a perfect road for motorsport’ anywhere on the planet. This fact hasn’t been lost on Toni Descallar, the organiser of the superb Rally Clasico Mallorca - the annual two and a half day event taking place on closed roads in early March each year from its home base at Puerto Portals - and in which I very much hope to compete again in 2020 in the e3 Systems Lotus Elise SC. Sa Colobra is perhaps the Blue Riband stage of the entire event: www.rallyislamallorca.com In winter, every single outlet in the village seems to be shut which suggests that if you’re visiting the island at this time of year, the most you will come across is the odd panting cyclist. Otherwise, the hill is yours. So get up early and go for the drive of your life. A brake-cooling short walk at the port village itself takes you through extraordinary foot tunnels to where the Torrent de Paries opens out in front of you, a convergence of where the two main gorges on the island eventually meet the sea - and one of the most beautiful spots on the entire island. You won’t be disappointed. TWO SWORDS It’s high time I talked about motorcycling and every year, the Mallorca-based ½ Milla Sportclub attracts bikers from all over the world for one of the most important motorcycling events on Mallorca - the Vuelta Mototourisme - a full tour around the island on some of the best hog-riding roads anywhere on earth, let alone a smallish island in the Western Mediterranean. For those who are into bikes, this late-April event, starting in the heart of Palma is not to be missed - and difficult to miss anyway as more than 7000 motorbikes thunder off up the Paseo Maritimo. It was at this ride-out in 2019 that I met the delightful Gabriel Ferrer, the Commercial Director of Motos Salom, the official Yamaha dealers on the island. Biele, as he is known, gave me my first view of his choice for that particular day - the extraordinary Yamaha Niken, meaning ‘Two Swords’ in Japanese. Since that time, I have been dying to try it out and Motos Salom gave me this chance, both to review it as a motorcycle and to thrill the kids at Fundacio Natzaret with something a little less ordinary than a purple Lambo... It is different too, billed as a sports bike but looking like a creature from a Transformer movie with two front wheels and a shiny and complicated suspension arrangement. It is perhaps one of the most intriguing and daring bikes to have come out of Yamaha, or indeed any other motorcycle manufacturer, for a couple of decades. Even if Yamaha end up getting a haircut with this project, one still has to commend them for venturing outside the box. A few facts first - it’s not a trike because trikes don’t lean over - at all, let alone to 45 degrees. A full bike license is required and no, it doesn’t stand up on its own. It’s got a smooth-as-silk 847cc water-cooled triple cylinder engine borrowed from Yamaha’s naked sports bike, the MT-09 and weighs a large-ish pillion passenger more at a relatively chunky 263kg. I guess the first big surprise was how normal it felt to ride, which sounds slightly oxymoronic but once you’d pulled away, you would never be able to tell that you were on anything other than a two-wheeled motorcycle. There’s some clever physics going on here and if you really want to know, the parallel quadrilateral arms and cantilevered telescopic suspension use the unique gyroscopic geometry to follow the Akermann principle, patented all the way back in 1818 for horse-drawn carriages... Got that? Effectively, it’s the same as on any car and allows the inside wheel to follow a tighter arc than the outside wheel for increased grip - up to 80% - and enhanced tyre wear. That’s one question answered. The next question is to whom a bike like this would appeal and without reservation, I can certainly say that it appealed to me as much as it would have to Rudolf Ackermann. Our criteria should usually be defined by the kind of riding we do, although we can get easily (over excited) by raw performance figures when, for 99% of the time, we live nowhere near this zone - it being too much of an adrenaline rush to be a default way of getting around, too dangerous with so many Gold Cars and shiny cyclists to lamp into - and always better kept for track days. Even a fairly moderate sports bike with its power to weight ratio performs on an A to B level right up there with the very fastest road cars.