Cafe/Custom Trackday

Taking your pride & joy onto a race track is one of the best things you can ever do as a biker, but mixing it up with guys on GSXR1000RRs and 1198s might seem like a bad idea if your pride and joy is Cafe Racer-shaped, or is a recycled 1970s Brat-style Bobber, a stripped-down Triumph Scrambler or a XS750 Flat Tracker…

A full-house of Ducs

If you’ve never done it, going on a track day seems like a really big deal – a huge right of passage that will give most (honest) riders butterflies, and a nagging fear that you are likely to crash. Next, you realise you’re uninsured on-track, too broken to work, lose your job, wife, kids and eventually you’ll end up in a cardboard box in the Southbank trying to remember what bikes you once owned, through misty eyes brought on by too much cheap lager.

Ian & Dutch scrape their pegs at Druids

The truth is that the track is THE safest place you can ever take a motorcycle, and as it’s “not a race” (the organiser’s mantra), and you’re grouped with riders of similar ability, the mostly likely reason to bin your bike, is over enthusiasm and showing off, or riding beyond your own skill level… But you don’t have to ride like this, after all, you don’t do it on the road. And as the cliche goes – the throttle goes both ways.

So back to my point.

You’ve built or bought a stunning motorcycle, a restored retro, bobbed and chopped metric or a cafe’d-up italian dream machine, and you want to ride it hard enough to warm the tyres, and then find a set of predictable corners that you can pass through again and again, bonding you with the bike and it’s road manners… With sticky tarmac and everyone going one-way, the track is perfect for this, and I’ve never met anyone who didn’t say their riding improved, and their relationship with their own bike was cemented after a bring-yer-own trackday.

To level the playing field (or the grid), clearly what we need is a trackday of our own, specially for cafe racers (old and new) street customs, flat trackers, bobbers and scramblers – so my only question is, who’s up for it?

If you’d be up for an event like this over summer, we plan to have a Bike Shed trackday, possibly at Brands Hatch, or somewhere central, within 100 miles of London. Stop reading this, and email us now on [email protected] and let’s get a list of names, and bikes. We can reserve a garage in groups of five or more, and if the numbers get high enough we can have the day all to ourselves.

You will need a proper fullface ACU Gold approved lid and full leathers, or zippable two-piece, plus a safe bike, not exceeding 102db (that’s pretty loud)… But that’s it.

And if you need any inspiration, here’s me, the Dutchess, and the two Ian’s at Brand’s Hatch last year.

RoboCop (aka Ian W) rides his Paul Smart…

…while the Dutchess rides RoboCop’s bike

Dutch at full-tilt

So, stop looking at pics, get inspired and send us an email. If we can do this, anyone can. [email protected] Please put BMSC Track day in the subject line.