Rally Report: Meltdown
A 350-mile round trip to the German all-inclusive scooter rally... and once again, it didn’t disappoint.
Jamie is back from the Meltdown, and what a great time he had. There is no other rally like it; Jamie explains why
This year was the seventh time that the Spirit of 84 Scooterists has organised the Scooterist Meltdown at the decommissioned nuclear power plant Wunderland, in a small town called Kalkar, in Germany. Your family and friends may think you’re mad when you say “I’m riding to Germany on my scoot” – and they might be right. Not that the distance is a problem. Kalkar is only 120 miles away from Rotterdam Europort; we’ve all travelled further to rallies in the UK.
The time of year made it a little rough, it was extremely wet and windy, otherwise, I'm sure it would have been an easy ride. On the plus side, for the five of us who were mad enough to ride over, we didn’t have one break down. That’s always a good result, no matter where you’re going.
‘Welcome to the Fabulous Meltdown’.
The Germans’ hospitality is nothing short of amazing. As soon as we arrived, we were greeted by the Spirit of 84 team, all dressed up in the style to match this year’s theme – ‘Viva Las Vegas’. The team were stood under a Welcome to the Fabulous Meltdown sign, and were holding trays full of shots of Ficken and handing out goodie bags.
Fellow scooterists, who hadn’t seen each other for whole year, were catching up while throwing back a Ficken shot or two. We’ve not made it through the foyer yet and you immediately get that awesome rally feeling signalling the start of a great weekend ahead.
Once we’d managed to tear ourselves away from the foyer, we rode our scooters through the gates, around into the main hall and exhibition area. The main hall is all shaping up for Saturday's main event with stalls and scooters setting up, but we've Friday to survive first. We dropped our scooters off and checked in, then it was straight to one of the two large restaurants for the all-inclusive drinking and eating to begin.
With everyone’s bellies full of food, most people head down through the dark, quirky, tombstone like underground tunnels to the bowling alley bar for more drinks, and where you always find a cheerful and energetic atmosphere.
Next on the agenda was to head back through the tunnels towards the band room, where we found an explosive five-piece band from Bristol called White Trash. Possibly not to everyone’s taste but they knew how to party, with their lead singer
dragging a table into the middle of the dance floor and climbing on it to perform the rest of their rock n roll set from up high.
The performance was a crowd pleaser. Later, if you’re not now done in, we headed back through more tunnels to enter the Indie Bar, where the real party Scooterists can be found, until the early hours of the morning.
Saturday comes and it’s the main event, where the big boys in the scene come to play, and it is all we want to see. There was a whopping 60 exhibitors and stalls at this year’s Meltdown rally, including SIP Scootershop, Scooter Center, Kingwelle, JB Tuning Classic Scooter Shop, Pinasco, Rimini Lambretta, Scomadi, SQooter.com and so much more. There is nothing tedious about going around these stalls at Meltdown, it is a completely different vibe
to some other rallies. Most of the stalls had set up games to win prizes or to help you get drunk (not that any help was needed), such as Spin the Wheel, Throw the Bean Bag in to the Cut-out Butt Hole, and Kick Start a Scooter to win a go pro.
Not only did they bring lots of alcohol and fun with them, they had brought all the top-quality scooter products, too. And there is something for everyone, whether you are in to Automatics, Lambrettas or Vespas it does not matter, they have what you need. If you needed any advice for your latest project or were planning to do some tuning or upgrades, the Germans’ knowledge and engineering skills were on top form and were passionate about helping fellow scooterists, too.
Speaking of projects, tuning and upgrades, the Power Awards and Custom Show saw some seriously nice scooters with some serious power. We saw (in my opinion) the most impressive looking scooter ever called The Flash that had a reactive paint job; it literally flashed in certain areas, not the lights, the actual paint. Me and many others had not seen anything quite like it before.
As for the Power Awards (aka Super Dick Duel) we witnessed a Vespa on the free Dyno, hitting an extremely impressive 65hp. This guy certainly answered the question of “Who is the, Alpha Male Tuner, Heavy Weight, Top Dog, General, Chief, Long Dong Silver, Divine King of Scootering?”
I suggest you head over to one of SIP scootershop’s pages to see it for yourself. Suddenly my 19hp isn’t looking so good anymore. Another scooter that had everyone talking was the five-speed Scomadi TT450 prototype.
However, I witnessed someone test riding this, and he didn’t have the smile I expected him to have, so I think there is still some work to be done, and at the hefty price of €9,900 you would expect to have that smile and then some.
While all this is going on we got to hear from the man, Markus Mayer, who travelled the world in 80 days on a Vespa. Now, this was a man who was committed to the cause: he sold his house, left his job and left his girlfriend to pursue his dream!
After Markus had enlightened us to his scooter travels, we had the second band of the weekend playing on stage in the main hall called The Skimmity Hitchers, hailing from the West Country. They came out with…. well, they came out with cider, and an exceptionally fun gig. They had the crowd laughing and dancing while they played their old-fashioned Scrumpy and Western- style tunes. Some slight lyric adjustments for added comedy, these guys were crowned by most as the best band of the weekend.
Once they finished their awesome set, it was time to announce the Custom Show results and the raffle prize winners. The raffle is free to enter and the prizes are huge (all-inclusive is done brilliantly at Meltdown). To name a few, there was a SIP performance exhaust worth €435, a Lambretta Crank from SIP worth €262, a Lambretta Salem Speed goodie bag worth €246, a Honda clutch for Vespas from Onkel Mikes worth €149, and so many more prizes like these to be won, FOR FREE!
Moving on from the main event into Saturday night we, and pretty much everyone else, went straight to the food halls to fill up before more serious drinking and partying. I’d like to remind you all too, the food is not quite the dirty greasy burger vans we all know and love, but they provide some quality food choices. Different, but