20 Things You Didn’t Know About The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
13. “All Those Feathers And He Still Can’t Fly!”
Memorably, the car chase involving the Lotus Esprit S1 starts with a motorcyclist pursuing Bond and Anya on a Kawasaki Z900 with a sidecar from San Pantaleo and along the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia.
Whilst the sidecar appears to be a missile, it was actually a working vehicle in its own right. It had been adapted by the special effects team at Pinewood Studios to include two ten-inch scooter wheels on each side and a Suzuki 185 engine. A stunt driver laid flat inside the unusual conveyance, controlling it with a small steering wheel and using a smoked windscreen that doubled for the black exterior of the sidecar to see where he was going.
Although it seems that the motorcyclist fires the sidecar using a button on the handlebars, the driver of the sidecar uncoupled it from the motorbike himself using a solenoid switch.
The sidecar did not travel as fast as was seen in the film; it actually travelled around 20 miles per hour and the footage was sped up during the editing process to convince audiences that it was a missile.