American-V Blog

A little something for all fans of Harley-Davidson's evergreen (orange?) XR from Gary Inman at Sideburn Magazine.

"There are another seven UK Short Track races this year, but if you only make it to one make sure it’s Amman Valley on May 29-30.

This is the first joint race between the UK Short Trackers and the European MEFO Sport racers. That means there will be the cut-throat semi-pros on their modern DTX (modified 450 MX) bikes, the slightly less bloodthirsty Thunderbike class full of framers and modified street bikes, PLUS the All-American Twin Class over from Europe. These are all big, fast, powerful V-twins. There are 1200 Sportsters in dirt track frames, modified XR1000s and XR750s. They’re going to haul on the Welsh 500-metre oval.

Everyone involved wants it to be a festival of flat track culture, so anyone who turns up on a street tracker, or even with one on a trailer or in a van gets in half-price. There’ll be prizes for the best of show, best budget build, best engineering and best paint.

There are two days of racing. Well, a night and a day. The Euro round and All-American twins are on Saturday night. Plenty of UK racers will enter the Euro race. Saturday’s racing starts at 7pm.
Plus there will be a bar in a marquee and food on-site, plus camping available.

Sunday’s racing starts at 1pm. This is a full UK meet with added crazy Euros ensuring it will be, we reckon, the biggest flat track race ever held outside America.

Adults £10 per day or £18 for weekend including camping. OAPS £8 per day or £14 for the weekend, Children (12 to 15) £3 per day or £5 for weekend, Under-12s go free."

Readers' Rides with a difference: you do all the work and we let you.

You've got to be on Facebook - because there aren't many other opportunities to let you post your own pics - but that does mean it'll be a familiar interface to most.

See The American-V Bike Park for more details.

Who else but Confederate? Not so much breaking the mould as reinventing it, and the most creative use of the S&S X-Wedge Motor seen to date, with Confederate's trademark integrated powertrain.

Just a quickie - you'll lose enough time dribbling over the pics in the link, if this sort of thing floats your boat - so I'll leave you to it.

I've gone all light-headed, but am really pleased to see a return to form from Matt Chambers' crew, now returned to their beloved New Orleans.

Thanks to Cyril Huze for the heads-up.

http://www.confederate.com/cm4/cx3.php

Took a while, granted, but as things are returning to normality after deadline, so the long term blog is taking shape. We've picked up the Fat Bob, got it up to the 1,000 miles and are awaiting the parts from the first upgrade ... some of which are probably in a holding pattern in the skies above the Atlantic waiting for the dust to settle.

See American-V Long Termers and Staff Bikes Blog for more details

A little more in-depth than the snapshot to give you a better idea of the look and feel of the magazine, and including all advertising. On sale now!

Don't forget this is running until May 3rd: the sun is out and there's a Fat Boy for someone at the end of it. What's not to like?

See http://demo.harley-davidson.co.uk/ for full details.

Due any day now, full preview will be available when I get a moment.

Again, double-clicking on the flipping pages will take it full-screen.

Profuse apologies, but we're running a little more than a week late: I'm waiting to hear exactly how much more than a week right now. Million and one reasons why, all valid, but it all comes down to me needing to get ahead of the game and stay there so that I've got the ability to cover weather, family, availability of bikes and computer crises with little more than a waved wand ... although, in fairness, any two of those would have been resolvable, just not all four.

I'm expecting office copies to be with me on Wednesday, so any new subs and advance orders will be going out then, and any existing ones should already be winging their way by then, because they go straight from the printers.

Those headaches have had a knock-on impact on maintaining the blogs too, which I'm updating currently, while continuing to chase computer problems around so I can get the on-line preview sorted out. If I ever meet the idiot at Apple who decided it would be a good idea to hi-jack one of the most popular typefaces in the design world for a bit of the new interface, thereby throwing a spanner of monumental proportions into the works, I'll mark him for life with a capital D in Helvetica Neue 103 Extended Oblique in the middle of his forehead. Pillock!

Still, onwards and upwards. No-one said it would be easy.

In the meantime, have the cover to be going on with. The website will be updated by Wednesday: just winning that battle at the moment.