'ring Tossed

A modern F/1 track has been constructed next door to the N�rburgring, and on Saturday it hosts an extraordinarily dangerous event: vintage motorcycle-and-sidecar racing. The sidecars are really just square metal platforms bolted to the bikes. Sidecar passengers, called monkeys, ride a foot off the pavement at 135 mph, sometimes prone, sometimes supine, their helmeted heads an inch off the track when leaning into turns. "Last year at this race, there was a bad accident," says Mika Hahn, a sometime monkey. "Four sidecars went into a turn together, two touched and over-rolled. One person was totally killed and had to be—how you say?—reanimated. He survived."

"The perfect sidecar passenger should weigh six stone [84 pounds] and have a pointed nose for aerodynamics," says a 6'7" 40-year-old biker whom I meet in the pits, "but I got this one: six-foot-seven and built like a brick s—house." He hooks a thumb at his towering 17-year-old son, who wears a black leather jumpsuit with his nickname stitched to the back: TINY.

"At least," says Tiny, "I got the nose."

Tom and Tiny Thompson are from Bulkington, England. Cheryl Thompson—Tom's wife, Tiny's mother—is a petite woman with painted nails who also wears full leathers. She too is a monkey. When her husband was 28, she explains, he rode his 1938 Triumph 250 everywhere. "He's so tall, he looked ridiculous on it," says Cheryl, a former sales executive with Prudential in London. "Like an elephant on a matchstick." She told him he needed an "outfit"—a sidecar—for aesthetic balance. "Get an outfit and I'll ride it," she promised, though she had no intention of doing any such thing. "Blimey if two weeks later he doesn't come home with a sidecar," says Cheryl. "I thought, Crikey." The couple painted THOMPSON TWINS on the Triumph. "The Thompson Twins," she says sheepishly of the new-romantic '80s band, "were popular at the time."

Cheryl sighs and says of Tiny, her only child, "He could ride a bike before he could walk." In 1983, Tom rigged a remote-control accelerator to his bike, tied a rope to its frame and let Tiny ride in a circle around him. Says Tom, "He was nine months old at the time."

"The other mothers in the park went mad," says Cheryl. "They said, 'Look at him, with no helmet!' I said, 'You try finding a helmet for a nine-month-old!' "

Tiny was allowed to drop out of school at 14—"They didn't want me back," he explains—and now spends the summer traveling from race to race with his parents, living in the back of a rented van. He loves his parents, and they clearly love him. How many 17-year-olds would be willing to spend the summer with their parents, sharing a single mattress? Tiny may have quit school, but the Germans have a phrase that fits him well: Reisen bildet. "Travel educates."

The Thompsons are protective not only of each other but of their fellow amateur racers as well. "We take calculated risks," says Cheryl. "The last thing you need is some barmy git out there who's trying to kill people. But you do get them. At [ England's] Mallory [Park speedway], on a hairpin, someone tried to push us out—to take a hole that wasn't there—and he smashed into my right hand. I could have killed him. Afterward, he looked at my hand and said to me, At least you can still peel the potatoes, luv.' I wanted to punch him out.

"We took a nasty bump at the gooseneck bend on [ England's] Cadwell Circuit," Cheryl says with classic British understatement. "This chap was going full out, and his stupid idiot passenger rolled onto the track, and it was either hit the passenger and kill him or go into the wall. So we hit the tire wall at 90 miles an hour." Cheryl says she was "black from top to toe" for two months. Tom was catapulted over the tire wall and lay motionless for 30 seconds with a ruptured kidney and three broken ribs. He slowly returned to consciousness and shouted, "I'm alive!" He wiggled his toes: "My legs work!" He wiggled his fingers: "My arms work!" Then, after a pause, he wailed to his wife, "Oh, my God, I'm blind!"

"There was mud in his helmet," says Cheryl, rolling her eyes.