TMX Editor gushes over the 2019 machines

By Anthony Sutton on 14th Jun 18

My inbox has been the cause for much excitement of late as it seems that each and every off-road motorcycle manufacturer on the planet is building stuff that I want to own and I want to own it right now!

The trouble is that I made a promise to myself that when I got my knee replaced a few years back, then that was it no more riding for me as the risks far outweighed the benefits.

Half the problem though is that many of the new bikes updates are the things that I struggle with such as kick-starting the damn things in the first place for example. With the majority of new bikes coming with electric start these days that makes me think hmm, maybe I can do this.

Just this week news of the all-new KX450 landed (yep, they dropped the F) and that looks like a cracking piece of kit and for the first time comes with an e-starter and hydraulic clutch. Of course, KTM were offering that kinda swag as standard some 10 years ago on their 450 SX-F. Makes you think, doesnt it?

I had another time-related shock just the other day when FUS Husqvarna team boss Michael Keenan posted a pic of himself riding on one of the nostalgia pages on Faceache or whatever its called.

Basically, it was fairly awesome (to me) because apparently Michael had a similar taste in kit to what I had and also owned a day-glo TUF Racing get-up complete with Sinisalo SCD pants. It wasnt until I stopped to think about it that I figured that it was taken about a quarter of a century ago. Bonkers!

I then thought about the other more memorable occasions from my more recent riding exploits and figured out that its 21 years since I was an AMCA championship rider, 12 years since I did the Romaniacs and qualified for that Maxxis round at Hawkstone Park in the same year, 10 years since I did a full year on the GP trail as a journo and six years since I last rode a bike!

Doesnt time fly when youre up to your eyes in work...

Moving on and much of the off-road worlds attention was focussed on France at the weekend as two of the biggest events in the global dirt bike calendar the 10th instalment of MXGP action and round three of the WESS went off in the home of rude waiters, onion sellers on bikes, stinky cheese, flamboyant football, berets, surrendering and people that say ooh-la-la, apparently.

Moving away from that stereotypical nonsense but sticking on subject or sur le sujet as they say in St Jean dAngely, haw-hee-haw-haw I initially thought it was a little bit weird that theyd schedule two such large events in the same country on the same weekend but was pleased to see that each had a huge attendance anyway.

Of course, France is much bigger than the UK and the events happened around 300 miles apart which in British terms is similar to the gap between Matterley Basin and Lockerbie so not exactly local but its still fairly impressive that each was so well supported which makes me feel a little bit envious if Im honest.

To make matters worse I then took a squiz at the website of the French equivalent to the ACU thats the Federation Francaise de Motorcyclisme and was pretty much blown away by the scale of the operation theyve got going on over there.

Perhaps most impressive of all was the portals sub domain ffm.engage-sports.com which is a veritable smorgasbord of information about events, tracks, riders and so on and

so forth.

Its definitely worth a nosey if youget a petit minute to see exactly what things could/should be like over here

TMX Editor gushes over the 2019 machines

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