Be Excellent To Each Other

My new e-bike should be being despatched roughly around mid-July, after a three month wait... woo!

I have almost no idea what any of that means JohnCoffey, but your bikes look really cool.

They are Cult Vans. So basically they have the Vans tread pattern from the shoes on them. They come in all sorts of funky colours. That bike is a modern one I ride. U.S made, weighs mid 20s. So nearly half of one of my tanks I don't ride. The stickers are like, Sega themed so I just rolled with it.



My mate calls them "Seagull shit" tyres. He's got a point.

Titanium, carbon, drilled chains etc. As Colin would have said "Adding lightness". I have to lug that big orange bike up 6 flights of stairs, and it used to weigh a lot more. Was killing me, so I became a weight weenie.

It's time for a game of 'Where's Warhead'

1. Where is Warhead?
2. Who's the other geezer?
3. Why should the bloke on the bike have been disqualified from this race, bearing in mind that it was a track race at the long defunct Fallowfield Stadium (AKA The Harris Stadium)?

Time for another round of 'Where's Warhead.'

1. Where is Warhead in this photo?

Today's Final Round of 'Where's Warhead?'

These are beautiful, and have filled my heart with joy.

Was that guy disqualified because you were holding him up?

Thanks. We found these today when going through a crate full of photos, looking for something entirely different.

I've put the answers in spoilers now.

Great photos!

Beautiful photos. Absolutely joyous to see. Thank you for sharing them with us.

No, and I was going to say that he couldn't have been standing still without support with both feet in the toe clips. But this isn't true. He could probably have stood still for several minutes.

When I was racing, one of the things we used to practice was the 'track stand.' For those not in the know, this is the ability to stand still, usually on the track banking, as a tactic to make your opponent(s) go in front of you so you could get the advantage of riding in their slipstream to conserve your energy and then pass them coming around the last bend to win the race. If you're unable to keep your balance and put a foot on the track, you're disqualified. This was usually in 2 man sprint races, but here's an example of this in a "REVOLUTION Longest Lap' race, something that we didn't have when I was racing. This is where in the racers aren’t supposed to cross the finish line for the first 3–4 minutes. At a random point between 3-4 mins, the starter will fire the gun signalling the “start” of the actual race. So you see them edging towards the finish line to gain the lead once started but is very hard to maintain.

However, as far as I know, no races are started in this way, it's usual for a non-racing team mate to hold a racer up at the start of many track races. As well as practicing at the track, Carl and I and some other kids used to practice track stands together in the school playground to see who could stay upright the longest. To make it even more difficult, we also used to do it without our hands on the handlebars, once we'd got steady. We used to draw quite a crowd to watch at times. You can sometimes see cyclists doing track stands while waiting at traffic lights.

Trackstands are bloody tricky but mad cool when you pull them off. It screams "they know what they are doing"

In my experiences, the inevitable occurs half a second before the traffic lights change.

Excellent pictures Warhead!

I used to do track stands at the lights (especially when I had clips), but I couldn't get the acceleration from that, that I could get with a push off the floor, so I reverted to that method, maybe with practice I could've done better, but I didn't do I didn't

When I first went to secondary school, it was boys only, but at the end of the second year we changed from Grammar school to Comprehensive and merged with a local mixed sex Tech school. We thought we'd impress the girls by swanking around in our cycling gear and doing track stands. They indubitably thought we were dick heads.

I think we spent as much time perfecting our track stands as we did on race training.

I didn't know that the two photos of me competing had been taken until they were handed to me. We had a couple pf photography enthusiasts in the club and they'd go to all the races to take photos of their club mates.

I'm a bit late but those camo wheels on JCs bike are fucking rad!

And cool pics Warhead.

Two of the coolest things I think can be done with bikes are wheelies, and trackstands.... I can do neither....

I forgot about wheelies.

As well as racing and touring bikes I’d had what I thought was a cycle speedway bike, but which was really just a rough track bike and looked very much like what became BMX bikes years later. I must have been about 12 when I acquired it, so it would have been 1966. If I remember correctly I swapped it for another bike that I rarely used. The frame had been hand painted bright orange and it had loads of stickers on it, one of which said 'Stamp Out Finks.’ It's the only sticker I can remember. Unfortunately I don’t have a photo of that bike. It had a single very low gear, with a freewheel, straight front forks and knobbly tires. In design terms it's was pretty similar to John Coffey's bike, above, but not as flashy, including only having a back brake which they don’t have on speedway bikes.

Anyway, in a field at the side of the River Mersey in Didsbury one of the local cycle speedway clubs had built a track. It wasn't fenced in, so anyone could use it at any time, except when there were organised race meetings there. There was no seating, it was just in the middle of a small field, flanked by Ford Lane on one side and the Mersey embankment on the other. I just checked Google maps and there's no sign of it now, the space appears to be overgrown with trees.

I’d ride down there regularly, usually with one or two friends, as it was only about a 10 minute ride from home. But no-one in my circle of friends had a similar bike, so they all wanted to have a go on it on the track. I also used to go to see some of the race meetings, which looked just like this.



And looks like this these days.



It's only now, when I've Googled to see if cycle speedway is still a thing (and it is) that I discovered that it was hugely popular, and in the Manchester area in 2014 there were all these clubs: Belle Vue Gladiators - Blackley Flyers - Blackley Monarchs - Blackley Panthers - Bolton Boomerangs - Briercroft Bats - Bury Comets - Chesham Comets - Chorlton Aces - Dean Devils - Denton Pirates - Denton Stars - Gorton Pirates - Manchester CSC - New Mills Eagles - Openshaw Monarchs - Tameside CSC. I had a look on the British Cycling website and it still lists quite a lot of speedway clubs, but having had a look at some clubs in the Manchester area, it looks like some suspended activities at the start of lockdown and haven't updated their websites since then.

I never looked into joining a club or riding competitively and by 16, I’d moved on to road racing, time trials and track racing and sold the track bike.

An odd memory about this was that I’d wrecked a pair of trainers riding that bike, because I was always trailing my left foot on the ground going around the bends on that track, or doing ‘broadsides,’ in other words skidding sideways, which we all used to do in a cinder based car park on School lane that belonged to the ABC Weekend TV studios, which was mostly empty during the week. My dad had bought me a pair of steel toe-capped shoes for use with the bike, but I even managed to damage the left edge of the sole, so he got it repaired, but had metal studs installed along the outside edges to prevent that happening again.

But to get back to the original point of this tale, the speedway bike was great for doing wheelies and I’d do them on our quiet cul-de-sac, or on the rough lane that ran at the back of our house, or anywhere else whenever I had the chance.

Just catching up after a break.

Wonderful photos Warhead and lovely stories behind them! Thanks for these!