Simon rides motorbikes, and then writes about them. He also co-presents the Front End Chatter podcast and plays bass guitar rather well.
Hello and welcome to....
THE FECTACULAR!
Yes, this is the century, the big one-zero-zero, the 100-not-out, the five-score... and widely rumoured to be the last ever Front End Chatter podcast with him, Martin Fitz-Gibbons, and him, Simon Hargreaves, loins girded by the veritable cod-piece of motorcycling on the web, bikesocial.co.uk, and Bennetts, the bike insurance specialists.
And in this very special live-in-front-of-an-audience-in-the-canteen-at-Cadwell-Parkingtons (although Mufga sounds like he’s actually in the toilet; do we look like sound engineers?) we have:
• MotoGP from Red Bull Ring Pull in Austria in which Mark Marquez and Andrea Dovizioso swapped paint atoms until one of them won, and Johann Zarco agreed to a split at the end of the season with KTM – because obviously it won’t go any further south before then, will it?
• Yamaha’s Ténéré 700 and KTM 70 Adventure R on the MCN250 test route (but at a track day, we’re kinda preaching to the unconvertible)
• the best upgrade from a GSR750 for a bit more comfort and more miles
• what categories of bike are missing from the modern range, and what’s biking’s next big ‘thing’?
• are brake lever protectors or bark busters best for clipping car mirrors during filtering?
• what’s a Moto Morini Milano, and is it like a Triumph Hinckley or KTM Mattighofen?
• what’s our biggest biking disappointment?
• is the future of the TT safe? And was it safe in 1998?
• ...and much, much, a bit, more!
Thanks to everyone who came along to Cadwell to make the FECtacular truly special, and contributed to a small moment of something.
And if you’ve downloaded Front End Chatter in the last five years, thank you.
Thanks also to bikesocial.co.uk and Bennetts for their enduring good humour and tolerance of a pair of chattering idiots, and please download Front End Chatter via bennetts.co.uk/bikesocial/news-and-views/features/podcasts
We’re on Twitter at @Mufga and @SimonHbikes, and occasionally elsewhere...
See your ears for FEC101 soon... or will we? Yeah, go on then.