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| Carl Bronner steer her monkey on their fave rig, |
DRIVING a sidecar is a challenge,
especially going around corners. Just slowing down causes the rig to pull to the
right and turning left requires the “driver” to synergise the demands of
momentum and understeer.
To prevent wobble and maintain a
more or less straight line, the rider also needs to ballast the hack.
This is why Carl Bronner carries
a 10 kg set of dumb bells and half a bag of dog food in the boot of her
Ural.
The dog food may help explain why
the monkey in her hack is a staffie.
Bronner bought the iconic Russian
bike because her balance was “not brilliant” after she had a bad fall and she
wanted three wheels instead of two under her. She fetched her Ural in the
Magaliesberg from Sidecar Africa, where rigs are on sale from R70k to R170k.
The bike and sidecar combo is
called a rig and you don’t ride it, you drive it. The sidecar is called a hack,
and the person sitting in it, the monkey.
To learn how to drive her Russian
rig, Bronner first had to unlearn all her biking skills. Finally getting it
right, sort of, Bronner had to drive her new rig on the narrow, busy tar road to
Brits to her overnight point as dusk fell.
Still getting to literal grips
with the fact that a rig driver has to plan any steering manoeuvre a week ago,
she almost went off one embankment.
“After that I kept to 50 km/h —
only to see the next day the Ural is marked in miles per hour!”
She then drove the rig all the
way to the KZN Midlands, en route falling in love with this heavy 750 cc bike
from the Irbit motorcycle plant behind the Ural Mountains in Siberia.
The only one on Kilgobbin Farm
who enjoys riding the Ural as much as she does is her staffie, who does not mind
being called a monkey at all.
When not driving a motorbike,
Bronner teaches corporate managers how to “talk” to horses on the Old Kilgobbin
Farm in the Dargle Valley, KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, using purebred Dutch Friesian
horses. Note, she does not teach “horse whispering”, but natural horsemanship.
Apart from the relaxing benefits
of taking some time out in one of South Africa’s most scenic settings, learning
how to get a horse to do something also qualifies a person to communicate very
effectively with people.
As she explains on her website:
“HorsePlay sessions are not only for horse lovers, but for anyone who wants to
explore an enriching side of life.
“Playing with horses gives us an
opportunity to discover how to have great relationships with the humans in our
lives, be they partners, family or friends. We enter into the world of the
Friesian horses, which is magical for humans, but just plain horse sense for the
equine partners in this experience!
“As Ray Hunt wrote: ‘You’re not
working on the horse, you’re working on yourself’.”
• More on http://horseplay.co.za.
Strange
but true Ural history
• The
Soviet Army started building BMW R71 bikes and sidecars in 1939, to prepare to
combat Germany’s invasion during WW2.
• To
keep out of reach of German bombers, the Ural factory moved to the small town of
Irbit, in the foothills of the Ural Mountain range. The only suitable building
to build the bikes in was a brewery.
• Irbit
Motorcycle Works (IMZ) built “civilian” Urals and began exporting in 1953. The
plant was only turned over to non-military production in the 1960s.
•
Over 3,2 million Urals have been built since the first M-72 rolled off the
assembly lines in 1939, each one a bit different.
