Ride when and where you can
By TMX Archives on 29th Dec 09
AS we rush headlong into 2010 T+MX editor JD urges you to get out and ride your bike whether it's trials, motocross or whatever...
AND as I ‘write' these words – at least I still think of it as writing, event though they are thrashed out on a keyboard – there's six inches of snow on the ground, it's absolutely freezing, and most of the weekend's events have been cancelled. So that'll be global warming then – sorry, silly me, I mean climate change. Call me a cynic – well Gordon Brown calls me a flat-earther because I dare to have a view of my own – but in my simple view of the world the term climate change was adopted by politcians specifically so they can tax the backside out of me (us) whichever way the wind blows or whichever way the barometer swings.
All of which may appear to have absolutely nothing to do with off-road, except that Gordie and his chums are going to do their increasingly crippling best to price us out of our sport. There's frankly not a lot we can do about that except to take my advice which is to get out there and ride your bikes as much as you possibly can, wherever you can, while you can!
Until very, very recently, the inhabitants of our sceptered isles were blessed with a fantastic network of ‘green' roads which, in the main part had been rights of ways for use by whatever vehicle was hot at the time; roman chariot, war-horse, steam traction-engine, bicycle, trail bike, whatever, for centuries. But with the stroke of the governmental pen we, the motorcycling public, were instantly denied their use. Nowhere was it written that internal combustion engines were not to be used on these ancient highways. It is my most sincere belief that if Caesar had had the choice of a big, throbbing V8 petrol-engine instead of a couple of puny ponies to power his chariot headlong along Hadrian's Wall, that is exactly what he would have ordered. It was just his tough luck that the V8 was still some 2000-years into the future. I really don't think he would have said: "That's it, no driving along my roads, walking only permitted!” But, blithely ignoring all that has gone before, it didn't stop this government trampling roughshod over what had been the law of the land.
Moving on, I remember back in the early 1980s when a chap called Roy Cary was importing Fantic and doing a damned good job of shifting large numbers of them. Roy wasn't exactly a trials type, he was a businessman first and foremost and he told us that the days of traditional trials were doomed and that instead of effectively riding all over the countryside we would inevitably end-up restricted to designated closed areas, or off-road parks.
Of course we all laughed. It seemed so far-fetched. But if nothing else I have thought about them many times since
Turns out that Roy wasn't actually wrong, he was just ahead of his time. And bizarrely he might just have predicted the future of the wrong sport.
Against most assumptions and many scares, both natural, such as ‘Foot and Mouth', and government induced, trials has continued to prosper. Road trials, with various tracts of land for sections being joined by tarmac roads, have made something of a comeback. And more power to them.
No, the threat of being squeezed into fewer and fewer legal places has been transferred to motocross. And mainly, I am sorry to say though not to admit, through our own making. The noise issue, brought about almost exclusively by the use of inadequately silenced, high-performance, single-cylinder four-stroke racing engines, has undeniably brought about the closure of dozens of tracks and practice tracks with many more in the firing line.
It's true that more and more local authorities are now having to take seriously the provision of a suitable place for motorcyclists to ride, otherwise we all know that certain factions will simply take to the hills and ride wherever they please, but we are backing ourselves into a hole.
The sporting authorities have done too little too late to arrest the racket of the ‘Fs' the healthy thrum of which may well be music to your ear but to the vast majority of the population it is simply noise. I admire those who take noise-testing seriously (the noise testers!) but we all know that clever pipe design drives a coach and horses (Caesar's?) through legal noise limits. Argue all you like but I have watched bikes being noise tested at the likes of Hawkstone Park (they all passed) – and then heard the same bikes bellow up the famous hill.
That's all you need to know in order to understand why noise is the number one threat to the sport.
Which is why I urge you to ride when you can wherever you can – while you can!