German Flat Track Race: All welcome

From Jan-Willem, Dutch Brothers...

Could you spread the word for this event on 12 June? Homberg-Ohm is a beautiful setting in Westerwald, Germany. The track is nice and hard and not too big. We will split in two groups so it will be an excellent opportunity for rookies to have a go. We rode there several times in the past and always had a great time. further detail on www.dutch-brothers.com thanks a lot! 
Jan-Willem

The Monks

In a way, I can't believe I haven't seen this before, but then, I'm a busy man, and there are over one billion videos on YouTube, with over 300 hours of video uploaded every minute, so it's hardly surprising.

I've picked this less than three-a-half minute clip to share because it is so heavy in significance that it blows my tiny mindholes. When filmed it was just over 21 years since Hitler shot himself in a Berlin bunker. American GIs and British Forces are stationed in Germany. Five of those US soldiers form a band called The Monks and make it big enough to appear on German TV, but don't make much of a blip elsewhere at the time. This clip is so clear and good quality that it looks like a modern recording trying to pass itself off as old, but it's totally legit. The host is like something out of a Coen Brothers film.

Look at the bright young things in the audience, late-teens most of them, born into a wrecked country, but not born into the hateful totalitarianism of the Third Reich. Would a band like The Monks have made it onto TV in mainland Europe if the Germans had won? Would they hell. Because it was filmed in Germany, watching this reminds me we only just got away with it.

The Monks, still serving soldiers at the time, made this avant-garde punk slop with strained vocals and strange time signatures leaving few clues where their influences came from. And they shaved the centre of their heads to look like, yes, monks. They'd go on to become cult heroes. The best description I've ever heard of them was by Denver Dan, one of the founders of Sideburn supporters, The Speed Merchant. He called them The Anti-Beatles.

I love The Monks. If you think you do too, buy the LP Black Monk Time. G

Motorcycle Cities - Hamburg

We have a few copies of this gorgeous, radical bookazine out of Belgium.
The editor visits a city, for the first issue it's Hamburg, Germany - and explores on his 1989 Ducati 750 Sport.
A4 format, luxurious print, with English and French text.
Limited to just 300 copies. Very, very collectable.

£9 plus post from sideburn.bigcartel.com

Full Throttle, Hot Dirt

A glowing report from the W&W Cycles crew who drove their big American school bus all the way from Würzburg in Germany to Kings Lynn, for Dirt Quake IV and then raced their not quite as cumbersome, but equally yellow, Panhead in the Chopper Class against the spritely Guy Martin...

“20 hours on the motorway to see a few unhinged blokes going in circles?” We’re in, and while we’re there we might as well have a go ourselves.
So it came to pass that the venerable Magic Bus FURTHER! was headed for the UK, to see DirtQuake, the one-off go fast, turn left meeting for the friends of mud-tracks, for the 4th time laid on by Sideburn magazine. It being our second time at the meet, we treat us to our own race class. There’s “Unsuitable road bikes”, “Chopper”, “Street Tracker” and “Ladies” to chose from, open for everything between antique BSAs and hopped up Vespas. And there’s our “Harley Class”, just right for the old clunker we brung straight out of the W&W museum: the Panamericana Pan, built for the 1996 MUD OF NO RETURN mud trip to Panama. There it had been mud-wrestling up to her fatbobs with central American dirt roads, so why not try the old girl on some middle England dirt track? Let’s see what the heap of iron can do on her knobby tyres.
The weather is glorious, and the King’s Lynn, Norfolk Arena fills with 5.000 spectators. The riders’ parade opens the proceedings, and soon the sweet sound of Harleys fills the air. The first race is a hard battle between the Panhead and its rider. The slippery mud is tricky, but the track is drying and our Pan-wrestling rider #80 Weigl is gathering confidence in the ancient rigid chassis. Together with a couple of Evo Sportsters, a hot flathead, 3 Ironhead Sportsters and a rigid framed Shovel they go round and round, to the cheering of a well stoked audience. Family entertainment at its best! A band is playing TV themes, there’s a kids’ bicycle race, a moped-tug-of-war, the motorcycle limbo contest and Ken Fox’ Wall of Death death defying stunt riders.
Big scare: in the Harley class’ second heat a rider goes down, no chance for the rider behind him to swerve round, crunching, screeching, flying machines, the dust is being kicked up, a collective gasp from the bleachers – the race is suspended. The medical team races to the scene, but after a few seconds the rider gets up, limps to the medical golf cart to frenetic applause and is taken away for further attention. There were no critical injuries on the week end, just a dislocated finger, a broken rib and collarbone and one tooth that went with the gloves during the “gloves off” competition.
Now for the finals: our PanAm Pan is starting from 9th position. In front are the pro riders, Mr. Guy Martin, the TT legend among them on a mean hotted up Evo Sportster with slightly extended forks. The first corner sees a packed field, Weigl #80 pushes the Pan to the inside, gets through, makes good a few places. #80’s experience shows. He rounds up all of the not-too-many horses in her, and makes the best of a package that’s a bit too unwieldy for the corners and too underpowered for the straights. After 4 laps he wills the old girl across the finish line on 5th, Mr. Guy Martin winning the Special Edition W&W Harley Voodoo trophy. Fifth place on a Harley that was built 20 years ago and was dragged from the museum isn’t half bad.
We’ll have to see what we bring next year. The Cuba Servicar of ours looks like it might be just the thing for a hot ride…

Berlin Coffee Club

We have a new dealer in Germany, the Berlin Coffee Club. It looks like a great place to hang out on a miserable winter's day.
Good luck with the business, Alexander.

If you want to stock Sideburn, or know a place near you that should/coudl stock the magazine, please get in touch - dirt @ sideburnmagazine.com

Kedo Bronco and Stallion

Yamaha are going for broke with the 'Yard Built' customs. This is the latest from German, SR specialist, Kedo and some official waffle as it arrived in our laps.

'The German customiser, KEDO, is the latest company to move into the EICMA spotlight. After taking part in last year's SR400 transformation - the Wrenchmonkees' Yard Built 'Gibbonslap' - through creation of the vital kit parts, KEDO is now busy with its own first Yard Built projects. KEDO, based in Hamburg, has presented not one, but two, SR400 concepts at the EICMA 2014 in Milan.

Click to see my favourite Kedo SR. G

Glemseck snaps

What with the chunnel and roadworks it was a 14 hour schlep from home to the Glemseck cafe racer sprint - but worth it. Trying to digest a very phallic Brätwurst washed down with a 1litre tankard of beer at 10am is quite daunting but we had fun.

Gary's Black Arrow was hot to trot.

- or if post-industrial GSX-R is not to your taste how about rear-as-front 16" white-wall tyres and drum brakes?

Seb's BM was sporting some new bling - including nitrous, and a new paint job.

Guy Martin: "SIDEBURN, the bloody best motorbike magazine on the planet....And not just because I'm on the cover"

Nutty Target 320, based on a KTM 690.

Nick's fugly but purposeful Honda Magna mongrel.

Frank Chatokhine's Triumph with lovely mesh fly-screen.

Kraftstoffschmiede R90S

BMW Roadster concept with impressive machined aluminium tail piece

Germans do like Trannies, this Feuerwehr was a minter. BP

Glemseck 101

After six years of making Sideburn, and travelling to many countries in Europe (and beyond) to promote it, we're finally making it out to Germany for the very first time.
Ben and Gary will be manning the Sideburn booth at the huge Glemseck 101 event, near Stuttgart, selling mags and stuff and generally being amiable Englanders.
Come and say 'Hallo, Sie sind viel schöner als ich dachte. Ich muss etwas kaufen.'

Artwork by http://surfazzblog.blogspot.co.uk

Dirt Quake Deutschland Help!

This fellow is Martin Segattini, we met at the Noyes Camp flat track school in Spain. He rides MX and whipped my sorry arse. He's a Sideburn fan and promised to come to Dirt Quake to ride his 1956 Harley chop. But then he over-cooked it on his BMX and broke an ankle.

It's pretty much healed now, but he'd really like to share his van driving duties and fuel costs from Münich, Germany - Or maybe you are en route (Luxembourg or France)? Can you help? If you are a racer he could even pick your bike up. Danke BP

Wannabe Choppers

New workshop Wannabe Choppers in Giessen, Germany now stocks Sideburn. That's the boss below. If you want to stock the magazine, please get in touch. G

Photo: Horst Rosler

Single and Twin Season Opener

Hamburg Sideburn stockists, Single and Twin Motorcycles, are having a season opening event on Easter Monday. Get along if you're in the area. G

70 Years Ago...

..today, since the break-out from Stalag Luft III. The Great Escape is a dramatised, Hollywoodised version of events. The truth of WWII break-out attempts is incredible. The ingenuity was mind-boggling.

The Great Escape is often wrongly remembered (by me at least) and depicted in UK TV skits as a feelgood movie of the 'good guys' winning the day. The poster, above, even calls it a great adventure - making it sound like a mountain biking holiday in Moab. Regarding the actual break-out, in 1944, of the 76 who escaped only three were successful - two Norweigians and a Dutch airman. Of the recaptured allies, 50 were executed on Hitler's orders (a war crime, as they were killed not during the escape, but when recaptured).

Apparently, a great deal of McQueen's Virgil Hilts character was based on the US Pilot David M Jones, who was on the Escape Committee and worked on the tunnels and planning, but didn't go through the tunnels and subsequently survived the war, went on to be a Jet Age test pilot and work for NASA. G

UPDATE: Coincidentally, Steve McQueen was also born on this day, in 1930. He died in 1980. If he were still alive, he'd be two years younger than Bruce Forsyth.

Iron and steel

Funny how things can pan out. A few weeks back, my wife found this knife in the street. It had clearly been lying there for a while and with no houses or shops nearby, she brought it home and I cleaned it up. It seems it was a promotional freebie, originally in a leather pouch and probably from the 1950s. I've seen others online stamped with Bayer and also made by Walter Kayser in Solingen, Germany, a town with a long history of blade making, the Sheffield of the Rhineland.

And this is Adolf Weil, a son of Solingen and known as the Iron Man thanks to his long career in motocross, most of which was spent as a Maico works rider, in fact the AW400 he's riding here in 1976 bears his initials. He won 14 national championships and three times came third in the 500cc world championships. At the age of 34 he won the Trans-AMA title. Adolf died in 2011, but the bike shop he set up in his home town when he retired from racing in 1977 is still run by his sons Frank and Jürgen. MP

Gestalten Space, Berlin

German publishing house Gestalten, the makers of the highly acclaimed modified motorcycle book The Ride, now stock Sideburn in their store - Gestalten Space in Berlin. It looks like a book lover's heaven. G