Friday 22 June 2012

My FS1E

My 1st road bike was a Yamaha FS1E (1976).
This was a great moped in the UK you could ride these at 16.  I worked at a petrol station while still at school and saved up for a brand new Fizzie, DX ( DX stood for disc brake) very high tech back then.  430 English Pounds back in 1976......


On my sixteenth birthday I was up at 5am helmet on and off on a very cold February morning for my first legal ride on real roads !!
Did 400 miles so well run in by the time I got back home , where I found my mother a nervous wreck as she thought I would kill myself!!!
Did manage to get it up to 50mph laying on the tank on a downhill section, god that felt so fast that first day.......     Anyway great memories

3 comments:

  1. I would have killed for something like that for my first bike! My grandparents bought me a Suzuki 50. That was ok but the great big leg shields and huge screen were an embarrassment :-).

    Thanks for the post - love hearing how people got started!

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    Replies
    1. Before I was old enough to ride on the road my dad got a moped given to him that I used to ride around the field behind our house. It was a NSU Quickly... Not sure if they ever got to NZ but had lots of fun.
      The Fizzie was very popular in the 70s in the UK. The other popular mopeds were Suzuki AP50, Honda ss50, I had a friend that had a Garelli moped that could manage 1 or 2 mph more than us Fizzie boys. Remember getting pulled up by local cop for speeding in town, turned our he knew my old man. Told me if he caught me again he would be round our house to see him, cops don’t use those sort of tactics anymore !!

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  2. I had the same bike when I was 16 too I remember watching a horror movie in Watford one night and on the way home to Hemel Hempstead the bike could not go fast enough for me on those dark country roads .Ha Ha Ha

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