Velosolex

VELOSOLEX.

MISERY.

It was the cross that did it; the final straw. It wobbled by six hours into the slowest, hottest, coldest journey I’ve ever made in my life. And, at that moment, I came to the conclusion that bicycles are only fit for healthy children who don’t mind appearing in public wearing a hand of hardened bananas on their heads, and that motorcycles are only worth the abuses of winter weather if equipped with enough of power to be blindingly quick.

The boss of my local bistro had his Harley-Davidson nicked recently and felt that a Velosolex would make a stylish, and visibly French, alternative means of choring about south London. Once more engaging mouth before brain had completed its morning ablutions, I agreed to go to France, find him one, and ride it back.

Those of you unfamiliar with this particular means of transport simply don’t know how lucky you are. Now, it transpires, rarer than species of wildlife that the French don’t devour, the Velosolex was once their ubiquitous equivalent of the tartan shopping trolley, with added hazard. It’s essentially a bicycle with a microscopic 2-stroke engine balanced over the front wheel. Logically, if the bicycle is the most energy efficient means of transport around, and the motorcycle is undoubtedly the most fun, the synthesis of the two that is the Velosolex, should prove to be the ideal in dirt cheap transportation. Wrong…

First problem. How to find one..? Freed of the early morning Chunnel, we shot straight into Calais. But, after 10 hopeless minutes in a newsagents, snapper Phil and I suddenly discovered that neither of us spoke any more than basic, beer and fags French. We bought dozens of local papers hoping to catch sight of an ad’ boasting the only written word we understood, and then sort things out loudly and slowly in the traditional style of the English abroad… Alas, no luck. So, under previous recommendation, we bought a bizarre magazine called Mob Chop. It was awash with customised mopeds sporting chromed pipe-cleaner exhausts and hip-flask fuel tanks. But on the Velosolex front? Nothing. Not a wild boar, garlic and herb sausage.

With the enormity of our 48 hour mission crystallising hideously, we hunted down the Tourist Office. “My gnome is awash with pink grit?” I enquired firmly. “Please release my octopus…” Things, however, got much better once we established that the girl behind the desk spoke English. There was, she recalled, a Velosolex club in town. But, half an hour of phoning later, she couldn’t find it. Could we wait ’til after lunch, she wondered? The wait would absorb an entire quarter of our allotted time for finding, haggling, buying and riding, so no. Not really.

So we panicked off to Lille at full pelt. Why Lille? Well, because it’s… er, big, not too far away and, thinking ahead, still in the flat bit of France. Allegedly…

Once again, having found the shops strangely devoid of the local press, we resorted to the Tourist Office. Helpful, bemused and English speaking, they quickly furnished us with a list of names and addresses, and a street map. For, if you want a local rag in Lille, you must, it seems, go direct to the presses.

The papers; Contact, Inter 59 and the dubiously titled Galibot prove about as useful as roller skates for halibut so, with the little hand accelerating ominously round the dial, we returned to the long suffering Tourist Office. We set off again, clutching a list of local motorcycle shops. Hopeless. But we did learn something, amidst the shoulder shrugging, to account for the Velosolex shortage: It seems that, whereas ‘chopped’ mopeds are popular with the spotty blades of France, the young ladies consider the Velosolex to be, along with a studied failure to shave their armpits, something of a fashion whiz at the moment. Back to the Tourist Office…

3.00pm. A bright idea (not mine), and the last resort; local radio. One list of stations and the repeated marriage of temple and index fingertip later, we persuaded Frequence Nord to broadcast an appeal. Told to return in a half an hour, we hid in a cafe. Two hours of being sent back to the cafe later, it worked… Turned out there was a bloke in nearby Armentieres who can sniff out a sucker downwind at 20 miles. We thumped off to find him; he saw us coming. He wore a blue boiler suit, a bent yellow Gauloise, and the expression of a fox who’s just discovered that the stretch of duck pond between the shore and the gently quacking island in the middle has frozen solid.

He showed us round the Velosolex, for which he wanted a whopping 2500 Francs. It looked woefully small, uncomfortable and dangerous, but it was clear by now that if we wanted a story, we needed his bike. We haggled. Or rather, I haggled; Jackie Haudiquet just stood there with his arms folded, trying not to grin so hard that his Gauloise fell out. 2000 Francs; the entire contents, bar moth balls, of my wallet, was my final offer. “Done”, he finally agreed; I certainly had been…

Mr. Haudiquet took us through the standard operating procedures. Not tricky. It’s a basic bicycle with one gear, front and rear brakes, and a bell to ensure that inadvertently mown down pedestrians will at least be facing you at the moment of impact. To start the engine, you simply lower the whole assembly onto the front wheel with a Big Black Lever, climb aboard, and pedal like a lunatic. All things being equal, the engine will eventually start. Power is delivered to the front wheel via what looks like a small, knife sharpening, carborundum wheel, pressed onto the top of the tyre. The tyre itself needs to be kept at a pressure of at least 2.5 bar to ensure suitably stout contact.

Being a 2-stroke device, it runs on a 4% solution. Being, myself, a lying on the sofa stroking the cat device, I began to suspect that, when it came to the journey, I might well need to run on Sherlock Holmes’ famous 7% solution…. Mercifully though, it was nearly dark. So, excused riding ’til tomorrow, we bunged our purchase aboard the support vehicle and bogged off into Armentieres for the night.

Next morning’s weather was filthy; cold, wet and windy. I put on every stitch of clothing I could muster, Topping off a snappy ensemble fashioned on a slow punctured Space Hopper in Timberlands with a genuine, 1944, despatch rider’s canvas coat. This is a chic, curry coloured affair that folds with all the alacrity of medium gauge sheet metal. A selection of poppers turns the lower half of the coat into neat, built in leggings.

Terrified at the prospect of tackling Armentieres’ rush minute traffic as a Velo’ novice, we trundled some yards into the green bit and found a quiet ‘F’ road where I could practice.

All that weight over the front wheel makes the Velo’ impossibly hard to control. Go too slowly and you wobble about like a bath full of blancmange hit with a cricket bat. Go too fast, and you quickly learn how inadequate the standard bicycle brakes are… But you need speed to corner smoothly; at all, in fact. With the aid of the support car speedo, we tried to max the thing: The exhaust, dangling beside the front wheel like a bent grandfather clock pendulum, spluttering hot gases up my right trouser leg, and the ‘Solex surged away like treacle off a cold spoon. It’s easy to understand why it doesn’t have a speedometer; at full chat it’s good for a face bending, er, 27kph. That’s just under 16mph… Marvellous.

For a while, though, puttering west along the banks of the river Lys, it all went swimmingly. The cold failed to penetrate my multi-layered defences, and watery sunshine appeared briefly on the weather menu. We’d mapped out a 102 mile route back to Calais, along what appeared to be an arrow straight, minor road heading for Boulogne. It would take time, certainly, but I felt I’d mastered the machine. It seemed to run beautifully and, as an added bonus, careful smoking at such breakneck speeds was not out of the question. Then… disaster; a hill.

People that bang on about northern France being flat have obviously never traversed it on a Velosolex; the place is littered with savage, 1 in 400 gradients. At even the merest hint of a hill, the little 2-stroke promptly hands in its notice and the pedals come into play. Furthermore, within seconds of starting a climb, the engine becomes worthless deadweight. You are, effectively, pedalling a naff bicycle, with no gears, uphill, with a 30lb weight lashed to the front mudguard. And downhill is no better. Once the engine reaches its own terminal velocity, it simply does all in its power to ensure that you have too. And I gave up trying to reach forward and disconnect it from the wheel at speed when we ran out of Elastoplast.

To make matters worse, French lorry drivers, dodging the motorway tolls, seemed to take a perverse pleasure in seeing how close they could pass me by without actually making contact; a sort of ‘chicken’ for one player only that left me weaving murderously in the slipstream. Of course, under pedal power, unassisted weaving was the natural order of the day: The ‘Solex proved utterly devoid of momentum, and all hopes of having built up a sufficient lick of downhill speed to deal with the next gentle slope were dashed within the first ten yards. It makes a lousy bike too; the saddle’s too low to straighten your legs on the pedals and, if you stand up for added push, you can barely reach the handlebars. In a word; lethal.

The upshot of all this tomfoolery, then, was 50% massive, coronary style uphill pedalling into a right lather, and 40% downhill freezing up of subsequent perspiration against skin. The remaining 10% of the journey was reserved for first class shivering in laybys. Never mind visions of short bursts of riding interspersed with a string of lively cafes full of steaming hot coffee, calvados and cheering locals; the bustling villages bisecting the early stages of the journey had vanished, to be replaced by mile after mile of absolutely nothing whatsoever.

Once I’d settled uncomfortably into the freeze, pedal, thaw, perspire, wheeze, and freeze once more routine, there was time for a little mental arithmetic: Let’s see, that’s 102 miles at an average speed of about 9mph. Which works out, roughly, at… A bloody strong case for bunging the damned thing in the back of the 4×4 ticking over on my rear mudguard, and switching on the heated seat to get my haemorrhoids back up to working temperature.

Which, I’m ashamed to say, with about the first 60 miles behind us, we did increasingly often as the day wore on. Snapper Phil would cruise ahead scouting for evil gradients, and then belt back to throw open the tail-gate and lob the odious ‘Solex on board. The grin on his face as we crested the rise and pulled over to re-acquaint me with the road added extra misery to every remount and, every so often, he’d simply omit to report on an impending hill at all; barrelling off, instead, to set up a camera tripod two thirds of the way up it. Bastard.

By the time the sea hove into view, the sun was setting. And by the time we finally made it back to the Chunnel, having originally been somewhat miffed at being denied access to a service tunnel by which I might ride, triumphant, clean under the bluebirds and straight into the heart of Kent, I was absolutely de-bloody-lighted at the refusal; enough is enough. And the Velosolex completed its journey in the back of Toyota’s land Cruiser whilst, in the front, steaming gently and finally free of that claustrophobic, korma coat, my heated seat dreams all came true.

Turns out, after all that, that the DVLA, displaying all the flexibility of a rhino in heat, reckon the Velo’ rates as a moped; it needs a brake light, battery power for the lights and a horn. So we’re now having a spot of bother sorting that little lot out. Any ideas? Still, in the mean time Tom, the bistro boss, can always hang it on the wall as a natty French accessory. Best thing for it if you ask me.