Friday a week ago we made it to Berlin to meet our friends Andreas and Steffi.
We spent three hours on the Autobahn with our old truck and the velocar safely tied onto the truck bed
Saturday we joined the "Velo Berlin" bicycle fair.
The Cargobike Fans Berlin have organized a race there, in which I wanted to participate.
Despite the rather cold and rainy weather it was great fun to meet all these crazy people.
A great variety of bikes were gathered:
Rickshaws, Long Johns, cargo trikes (one leaning trike), longtail bikes and another four wheeler.
The drivers had to start in two divisions. two wheelers and three/four wheelers.
All had to complete one lap with the empty bike, then loading their bikes with two water containers, two bundles of newspapers and three short plastic pipes.
Due to two low ramps, which were set as chicanes on the race track, all had the choice to pass them at low speed or to risk the loss of some of the cargo stuff, what happens several times.
This resulted in permantly braking and accelerating, what my velocar is not made for.
Every time I passed the ramps, the hard backrest hits my back and this left a painful bruise there.
But because of my deep cargo trunk, nothing worse happened and despite my rather low speed I was able to overtake some of the competitors, who had to pick up their lost cargo from the track
Finally I became second place (of eight, I guess) in the multi track division, behind the mentioned leaning trike, a Veleon.
I had not the slightest chance against that high tech thing.
As always, here are some photos from that weekend:
A short ride with bicycles and velocar around Lake Grunewald
Still in Berlin-Grunewald we made this
"Eight-cylinders-vs-four-legs"-photo
Andreas and my son in the Retroadster
Lake Grunewald
Daddy is not to see here, because he's behind the camera
I have found an old French book with plans and building instructions for many projects, from bicycle sidecars, velocars to small motorized sportscars.
Somewhere in the book I found a two seater velocar, wich is quite similar to my project:
The book was printed shortly after WW2, so the motivation for building such things may have been different than nowadays.
Then it was simply the lack of alternatives:
Almost no cars at the market, no gas to run them and just low tech materials available (mostly wood).
Nowadays it's more a fun thing for persons, who are not pleased with all these usual high volume products, and instead build themselves an unique piece of craftmanship, which cannot be found elsewhere.
