Icon Motorsports best known for their motorcycle apparel and motorcycle drifting videos has again raised the bar. Icon has unleashed a new video called Dirt Rider. Dirt Rider is based in sand dunes with a tricked out Triumph Street Triple with paddle tires rear tire and knobby front.
What happens next I will let you watch and enjoy but we are always excited with every release of Icon videos. Keep up the good work.
To race motorcycles on ice takes a special breed of motorcycle rider. So what better crazy racer to cross train to race on ice than a Speedway racer. Speedway racing is a crazy sport on it’s own. Speedway uses purpose built motorcycles to go crazy sideways around the track. Mikkel Jensen hailing from Denmark took the challenge to learn to ride a Ice race bike. That is until he saw the bikes in person did he start having second thoughts.
Well to liven things up Ice racers take relatively the same Speedway bikes and put a box full of studs in both the front and rear tires. These studs give the bikes unbelievable amounts of traction on the ice. I am talking about almost dragging handlebars around corners type of traction. They also don’t slide at all instead ride around corners similar to road bikes.
In comparison to Speedway where they gracefully slide around on the dirt, Ice races go full force into corners. Austrian World Ice Racing Champion Franky Zorn took on the task of converting Mikkel Jensen to the dark side.
When someone thinks of motorcycle drifting you think of the crazy trick riders we see all over YouTube. Well where does motorcycle drifting originate from? Well we stumbled across a video where Australian Bob Patterson claims to have invented motorcycle drifting way back in 1976 when most of us were still young pups or not even born yet.
After watching the video it is actually remarkable that some of the stunts he is doing are still in practice today. Watch as Bob drifts with his Honda 750 which in comparison to todays machines must have taken a lot more skill to achieve the same results since present day machines have more horsepower, brakes, suspension, etc. I would love to see some of the present day stunt riders try to use one of these Honda Old timers performing the same stunts.
Blast to the past and we love it.
The season has not even started yet and Cal Crutchlow is already feeling left out. As a Pseudo factory rider for Yamaha he is kind of like the red headed step child of factory riders. If you remember back to last season the musical chair fiasco. Well Cal Crutchlow was supposedly set for a “real” factory team ride. However, when the music stopped Cal was only left with his dick in his hand and all the “real” factory rides being taken.
So why do I keep saying a “real” factory ride in comparison to his factory ride? It’s simple my dear Watson. The Factory Yamaha Team comprising of Valentino Rossi and defending MotoGP Champion Jorge Lorenzo will receive parts from the factory hot off the presses. Once Rossi & Lorenzo have used these parts for a race or 2 they will trickle down to Cal Crutchlow eventually…
Fair you ask? We think not. But hey that’s life, tough shit. Cal is the first one to speak his mind in the paddock and tell everyone what he is thinking. So in the run up to this weeks Sepang test Cal was disappointed as he had no new parts to test. He even posted on Twitter saying that the only new thing for him to test was his new numbers on the bike.
Well Cal not only can talk the game but he can ride the hell out a MotoGP bike. Today at the Sepang test he again reminded Yamaha why he should get Factory support by setting the 3rd quickest time of the day. We hope Yamaha will give him some more support this season as it will make the Championship even more exciting to have five or six guys battling for the top podium spot. It sucks he doesn’t have the “real” factory ride but if he performs well we hope the Factory parts will trickle down quickly and he will not be forgotten when the parts are passed out.
It is easy to sit on the starting grid of a race thinking about how you are going to get the Holeshot to the first corner. You arrive at your starting position, the adrenaline is running full bore through your veins, and then your competitors start lining up next to you revving their engines. You can throw all your thoughts out the window if you let the adrenaline take over your thought process and let your throttle and clutch run.
I have been in the same positon during my Supermoto racing career. One of my first races I was so nervous that the adrenaline was taking over my body that I launched my motorcycle straight into a stand-up wheelie off the starting line. Fortunately for me this was not caught on video or photo and I didn’t crash. Although it was a huge learning experience for me to train on starts for motorcycle race starts.
Having witnesses a lot of amateur racing I have seen this happen over and over where riders get over excited off the start line and wheelie, scaring the crap out themselves. But this video takes the trophy for Holeshot Fail Fame.
