New bikes and testing times!
By TMX Archives on 15th Jul 11
Leaving officialdom alone this week, editor JD takes a look at new bike launches and recalls a couple of memorable tests...
In this crazy off-road world in which we live we have lately all found ourselves, almost by surprise as it is still relatively early in the year, caught-up in a welter of 2012 bike launches.
Not just launches but actual tests – with some of the bikes at least having almost beaten our published tests into the dealers' showrooms! KTM has led the 2012 charge with their full European model launch, rapidly followed by separate ful scale motocross and enduro press tests, followed by the first batch of actual 2012 bikes reaching the dealers before the tests were published. Talk about the early bird catching the worm.
This week, Kawasaki gets in on the act with its uprated KX450F, tested in Italy which is of course nice work for some. Not me I'm afraid, and not that I could do much with a 450 MXer myself!
We have also done a couple of 'new model' trials tests in the last month or so, but the trials factories don't get quite as obsessed in beating their rivals to the 2012 punch. The models we have tested have been 2011 special editions, like the Gas Gas Raga Rep and the Sherco Cabestany Rep. In general the trials factories pretty-much let the natural calendar dictate when next season's models are launched, tested and hit the shops.
This is basically dictated by the Catalan factories all taking the entire month of August off work! Never mind the economic climate, when its time for the annual holiday the factories are simply deserted. So if we (that's all of us) are lucky the trials manufacturers release pics to whet our appetite towards the end of July and then promise delivery "...some time in September” which is fair enough!
Gas Gas has tended to break ranks with a naughty batch of new season's bikes at the end of July but by and large you can trust the trialers to pretty much stick together.
Not that they necessarily do it by any sense of loyalty towards each other. Being small and not in a position to manufacture everything (or even anything) themselves they are heavily dependant on the subsidiary manufacturers. Frames, forks, hubs, brakes, carburettors, rear shocks, plastics, rims, etc, etc all have to come from somewhere and these outside manufacturers all have their production plans to schedule.
Hence you occasionally visit a trials factory and see a batch of 100 (maybe more) almost bikes, busy doing nothing but clogging-up the factory while they wait for a kickstart or throttle body or something as small as a fuel tank cap. The lack of any one tiny component can halt the whole process for everyone.
Not everyone is actually all that enamoured with the mad dash for 'next year's model'. Gas Gas importer John Shirt has expressed a wish, several times, for an end to this annual mad scramble.
Says Shirty: "Why do we have to have this model year thing. With cars you don't have a new model each year. They launch a new model every few years, until then you just keep manufacturing and selling the current model.”
His argument does make sense and would possibly help to control the mad annual 'buying season' which is basically 'sometime in September' until Christmas.
The all-new Ossa trials bike was a clear victim of exactly this. Originally due to be released in September/ October last year, it was virtually Christmas before the first models arrived in Britain – by which time the annual sales frenzy had been and gone!
All of this then got me thinking of some of the bike tests that T+MX has been involved in down the years.
One classic was Mike Greenough unloading from its trailer the sole 325 Italjet trials bike in the country, starting it up, still in his jeans and trainers, and promptly spectacularly crashing and comprehensively trashing it. Bike re-loaded on trailer and 'test' over before it had even started.
Our all-time favourite though was when then staffman Mike Sweeney drew the plum job of being whisked down to the south of France, wined and dined by Yamaha (this really was back in the day when manufacturers' off-road launch and test budgets appeared to know no bounds – how things have changed) before being let loose on a full Grand Prix track, complete with a complement of factory mechanics to fuss over bike and rider.
The occasion clearly got to Sweeney as, on an unfamiliar GP track, fast and as hard as concrete, he got carried away and powered to his fastest, most spectacular, cart-wheeling and damaging crash ever. When Mike (and the YZ whatever) eventually came to rest it was with several limbs pointing in directions that they really shouldn't have been and he was mercifully rapidly carted-off to the nearest hospital.
This was one Friday afternoon and after he had been duly ambulanced, checked-out at hospital and plastered-up – one arm, one leg – a very sad and sore Sweeney rang editor Bill Lawless in Morecambe to pass on the 'good' news.
Bill's response to Mike's bleatings of broken limbs? "Yes, yes Mike, hard luck mate – but you WILL be in at work on Monday won't you...!
