We like a challenge. Say hello to our TZR250 and Moto3 projects. Have faith.
In a fit of madness, ad man Charles Charlie Charles decides it’s time to go racing, but doing it the easy way would be no fun, so he’s going two-stroke! Good luck!
You are going to need a little bit of background to recognize the challenge that I’ve given myself this year. I’ve spent the last ten years creating cash that has kept these pages full of mint bike stuff, working with incredible riders, all of whom have been devoted to two wheels since they could stand on two legs. My introduction to bikes is very different. I got my full licence when I was twenty, because the L-plate on my Vespa wasn’t very ‘Mod’.
Having become a half decent ad-man I fell upon Fast Bikes as the ex-owners had fired the last chap. Since then it’s been very different – running staff bikes and European tours, and being rolled out for experiences that would be wasted on the FB big guns that have sharpened my skills and added a proficiency that I wish I had learnt in my teens when I had rubber-like bones. As it is I am now forty-three and have a real hankering to get a couple of monkeys off of my back.
One is to experience the utter joy of two-strokes that the better informed generation bangs on about, the second is to get it on a grid and get racing. So that’s the plan, build a two-stroke race bike and race it. Easy, huh?
It just so happens that it was talking to advertisers that helped devise this plan. My friend Giles Harwood, the guv’nor at HPS, introduced me to the Yamaha Past Masters Racing Club, a series designated to Yamaha’s two-strokes. Giles’s talk of a jovial paddock and evidence from a closed Facebook group, where over the winter people have been trading parts, experience and advice, has filled me with confidence that this is the place to feed my curiosity.
There are eight rounds across the year, starting at Brands Hatch and visiting Cadwell, Silverstone, Donington and Oulton Park, before my target round, the last of the season held at Snetterton on the weekend of the 7th/8th October. Ideally I would get to an earlier round but I have to be realistic – as the bike is nowhere near built yet…
So to the bike itself, and what are the odds that all planets would align and we would have a TZR250 2MA sitting downstairs at Fast Bikes towers in numerous boxes? This was BJ’s project from a few years back that went on the back burner. It has a history, too. A bike that Beej first rode in the early 1990s, tried to buy off a mate but ran out of