Dirty Minded
In preparation for Skegness Beach Race 2019, the FB lads have been putting some miles in on the off-road bikes to see how unfit they really are.
Winter. Come on, how crap is it in terms of riding? I mean, Me, Dangerous and Boothy have had a mega season of racing this year, but to be honest, we just didn’t want it to end; and the fact we still can’t decide which one of us is the quickest means it can’t just yet (although spoiler alert, it’s definitely my good self). Yet every year, Mother Nature has her say, the weather changes, and all of a sudden we’re racing to pick up the biggest turkeys, rather than racing around a racetrack. And you know what? It had us thinking – we hadn’t even packed up from our final round of endurance racing and we were already hungry for more. Over the last couple of years we’ve had the odd off-road long termer here or minimoto race there, but just imagine how good it would be if we could keep on racing the whole year round? You know, keep that adrenaline buzzing, those bike skills razor sharp (or blunt, if you’re Bruce) and that smile on our faces that only two-wheeled internal combustion can bring?
Funnily enough, it didn’t even take much digging to find a shed load of two-wheeled action throughout the dire months of the year. From motocross to minimoto and everything in between, there’s absolutely no excuse to give up on riding just because the going gets colder and wetter… you just need to change the type of riding. So it had us thinking, how can we make the most of winter, and show you lot how to keep tasty on two wheels in the process? Well typically, here at Fast Bikes magazine we didn’t want to aim small, and after a year of tarmac endurance racing, we felt like anything was possible. Enter, the Skegness Beach Race 2019. For those of you blissfully unaware of beach racing (as I was merely a month ago), get it up on YouTube now
– and if you aren’t intrigued and taken back by the unfolding carnage, I’d be incredibly surprised. An hour-and-a-half of absolute bike brutality and body battering off-road carnage? Sign us up.
Between us though, Boothy is the only one out of the three of us with any proper off-road proficiency, having raced MX when he was a nipper, so we needed all the help we could get. This meant nicking three of the best bikes in the biz from KTM, going shopping for a load of new kit from Fly and Oakley, and most importantly, getting a bit of training in first. So, on a disgustingly wet, cold and dingy day where no man nor beast would fancy heading on two wheels, we went for a blast to try and get our eye in before the big race ahead. And you know what? It was the most we’ve all laughed in a long time. Cue the carnage…