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In the beginning was BIKE Magazine, and it came to pass that in October 1984 they did publish an article about the Vingt Cinq Heures d’Orleans. On Velo Solexes. Ever seen one? It’s a substandard bicycle with an aboriginally primitive 2 stroke engine over and driving the front wheel. Brakes are nominally fitted but appear to have as much chance of slowing the thing as Bernard Manning has of being Michael Jackson’s best mate.

Inspired (do what?) by this, the staff at Bike decided to run a British version of it, based on the twin concepts of cheap racing and booze. The first event ran at the Birmingham Wheels Project in November 1985 with four classes of bike; 2 stroke sports, 2 stroke step through, 4 stroke sports and 4 stroke stepthrough. All were theoretically 50cc machines. The race itself lasted for 4 hours and was run a on a thing called a kart circuit, but which was more of a derelict car park, in a roughly 1/3 mile loop with a few bends thrown in. The track was marked out with walls of tyres, outside of which were the few sad and deranged individuals who had come to watch.

And I was one of them. The Bike version of racing had almost nothing at all to do with the ACU concept. The only real points of contact were 2 wheels, an engine and a start and finish line. The rest of it was simply chaotic circulation, absolutely silly and pointless crashes and collapses of engines and frames and wheels. The spectators got into the spirit of it by rebuilding the tyre walls as soon as someone had crashed through them; the crasher was then left with the problem of getting back onto the circuit. Sometimes the riders saved us the bother by completely clearing it. The best of the day was the bloke who used a faller on the track to launch himself into a position of perfect balance with himself on the bike and the crankcases on the wall.

1986:- My first Moped Mayhem. Peterborough in May at the BMF rally, and Bike’s last direct involvement. The chosen steed of a Honda SS50 was ditched due to a lack of anything working at all. It was replaced at the last minute by a scooter with no go, no brakes and not much steering. It did have a comfy seat though. And a cheery little horn. I got a broken right thumb in practice on the Saturday but apart from that, we were set fair for the morrow.

The Sunday: the Le Mans start, stolen by the French who disguised the fact by naming a whole village after it. 100 nutters leaping on to various machines, setting off only to pile into each other at any and every opportunity. The whole 4 hours of the race around a rectangle of the East of England Showground’s access roads degenerated into an occasionally mobile brawl, with frequent stoppages to scrape the remains of the fallers into a bucket. It was a belter of a race. 8th in class at the end of it, bruises everywhere, and the bike didn’t look any the worse for it all. Yes, that bad.

The next meeting was run by Mayhem’s Eminence Grease, Cliff Moore at Tyrham Hall hotel in darkest Yorkshire. Around the pub and it’s car park. It’s crappy car park. With walls, potholes, dust, kerbs, lampposts, crowd barriers and a telegraph pole trying to hide behind a straw bale.

The format was 2 × 3 hour qualifiers on the Saturday and a 3 hour consolation race on the Sunday for the donkeys and a 5 hour thrash for us superheroes. This was on one of those October weekends that give you a little summer and it brought some odd casualties apart from out of season sunburn, like dust clouds coming up off the track that so inflamed some people’s eyes that Doncaster Royal Infirmary Casualty had blind people queuing for treatment. There are many images of the weekend, most comical, one tragic , someone opened a door and smashed my bottle of slivovitz. The anti serious spirit of Mayhem was focussed on Team Kawasaki Staff who were persecuted not for being successful, which we all aim for, but for being po faced and ignorant towards their fellow competitors. Mayhem is too big to tolerate the Superstar mentality. Crashes- my favourite was the rider that parked his bike in a crowd barrier so when he fell off, it stayed upright. Desperation , the team who tried to fix a puncture by wrapping gaffer tape around the outside of a tyre. Patience , Ray Clarke of the Wannabees marshalling on the pits corner and mournfully replacing the tyres that marked it and having his head firmly nudged by handlebars as he did it over and over. Silliness , there were strippers but I couldn’t get to see them as there was a White Helmets style human wall all around the room. One bloke had his eyes bandaged as a result of riding through the dust clouds so he had to have it described to him. Horribleness – the toilets ran dry due to low local water pressure.

1987 and the first Mayhem Championship Series. We had tried to get on to the kart circuits but the depth of anti motorcycle bias had to be experienced to be believed, so we ended up racing on stock car ovals for the next 2 years. Lovely places, rubbish tarmac & evil barriers to run into. So you didn’t. The riding became a composite of the bizarre and the brutal. People got so used to being run into by following riders that they wore body armour on their backs. I personally apologised to someone who ran over my head, after all, I shouldn’t have fallen off in front of him. Methods of getting the run into a corner: stand on the next bloke’s brake or gear lever. Use your left hand to pull on his front brake. Place left hand on opponent’s right shoulder and haul vigorously. Best of all, place left hand over his visor and frighten crap out of him.

One of the best ever Saturday nights was at Skegness at the start of 87. Everyone piled into this huge old barn of a bar, having fuelled themselves with noxious fluids & cigarettes whilst barbecueing toxic chicken. They then started on the contents of the bar and waited for the entertainment. First the band came on and just did a sound check. The loonies started dancing. To anything. Eventually, there were several hundred of them just boogieing to the sound of the bass drum. On its own. After that, Dazzling Darren (The Dynamic DJ) And His BeeGee record entertained the multitude until it was time for the strippers. At this point there was a hiatus in the proceedings as they refused point blank to go out in front of “that bunch of animals”. They had a hell of a nerve , you wouldn’t have wanted to get in a fight with any of them, although they could probably have opened bottles for you. Or even hidden them. Now Cliff at this point is in a state of panic, as inside the building is a mob chanting, to the tune of the Earwig Song, Get Em Off, Get Em Off.

Enter A Hero. A character known as Willie B gets up on stage and announces “Lads, I’ve got some bad news”. They all booed. “It’s about the strippers”. They all hoorayed. “They say they won’t come on stage”. All boo. “What do we think of them, lads?” Absolutely huge boo. “I’ll show you what we think of them”. And he turns round and drops his trousers at the crowd. It took 5 minutes for the cheering to die down. After that it went like a bomb, huge amounts of ale swilled, band played their hearts out, everybody v. happy. At some point the band packed in and went home except for the bass player who was found wandering around the campsite as dawn approached, nearing the shores of hypothermia.

Come the Sunday, the campsite looked like a massacre had took place , bodies everywhere, legs sticking out of tents or under vans. Not always their own. Tents collapsed on their occupants. Occupants collapsed on their tents. Every now and again a bundle of rags in the middle of the field would sit up, look round and fall over again. When the race came, you couldn’t frighten any of them as they were already involved in their own Near Death Experience.

We raced at Skegness, Hednesford, Northampton, Buxton. Finally, in 88 we got to race at a real circuit, the sprint track at Curborough, and that’s where a subtle change started to take place, from being a rally with a race thrown in to being a race with a rally thrown in.

One development started in 87 when Clarky of the Wannabees built a monkey bike outfit to cart his brown ale round. There was an immediate response from the less responsible members and in 88 the sidecars were born. Most of them in the early days were solo bikes with chairs lashed or sticky taped on, but Clarky built the first specialist chair. Shame he didn’t have a specialist engine. Things have moved on since and the last time we were at Ty Croes they were cracking on towards the ton at the foot of the hill on purpose built kneelers. Somehow though they don’t have the charm of Clarky using a blowtorch and the stainless steel floor pan of his sidecar to fry bacon. We had to delay races twice at Curborough so his mate could have a sandwich.

1989 saw us using Langbaurgh in Middlesborough, a council operated kart circuit. The jump from the stock car ovals was so great we thought it was huge although it was only 1,000 metres. It really improved the quality of the get offs, you could slide for yards and yards before you stopped and you usually had a chance to avoid other people’s wreckage when they gobbed it. One feature of Langbaurgh was the delightful aroma of the chemical plants along the Tees, prompting the place to be also called “What’s that bloody smell?”. We used Blyton for the 1st time in 90 while I think about smells. There’s a maggot farm there and they spread maggot crap on the fields as fertiliser. You really don’t want to be in a sidecar when it rains and the outfit in front kicks up a plume of maggot slurry. Fortunately this took your mind off the potholes on the old bomber runway together with the gravel and the tractor tyres that marked out some corners.

Around about this time the horsepower race really started. We first got an inkling of the potential of the AR50 motor at the Hednesford stock car track in 87 when the Trolls had theirs in a 2 wheel drift on the banking. And it did get measured, so they weren’t using a biggie either.

After a while the ARs had to be separated from the rest of the sports 2 strokes as there was nothing else road based with that kind of development available. We actually succeeded in killing off a class in the early 90s by being too pedantic with the interpretation of the rules governing 2 stroke step throughs. At the end of the 90s we changed the sidecar engine rules as the Honda 90 motors were getting rare so now you get 110 2 strokes and 130 4 strokes. Race duration was changed as well since even a restricted carb 2 stroke was substantially harder work for the crew, times went from 1 knackering hour to _ a knackering hour.

Manby! We took part in the Manby Wheels events around that time and that was fun in its own way. We used the old apron of the airfield to set out monstrously twisty little loops on the concrete, which were hard enough on sunny days on the solos.

On the chairs it was crucifying. Dehydration and heat exhaustion were compulsory for the passengers, as were badly bruised ribs and pulled muscles and cramp. The ribs were as a result of abandoning muscular control of movement across the platform and using the Gs as you left one corner to get you in place for the next, it was the only way you were going to get through the hour without collapsing.

The concrete was OK in the dry but a sod in the wet; fortunately most of the time the sun came out and turned the moisture & 2 stroke smoke into a nourishing oleaginous fog.

93 saw us use Rowrah kart circuit for the first 1st time. 600 metres of Shellgrip tarmac, and hairpin, hairpin, hairpin every step of the way. The weather there has almost always been good except for 97 when we were hit by some sort of Cumbrian monsoon. Just about all the tents were blown down or away and there was a postcard from Norway claiming the prize for the furthest travelled. As for the temperature, the only time it stopped raining was when it started snowing. The circuit got lengthened, in 98 I think, to 1,000 metres with a couple of longer straights and a chicane that was tight on a solo and arm wrenchingly painful on a sidecar. The camping there is novel. All the tents are pitched high up by the gate as that’s where the grass is. All the vans & caravans get to park in the bowl of what is actually an old quarry, so if you want easy access to the track, you bin the canvas and get something with real walls and room to swing at least a small cat. And some shelter when it blows.

Ty Croes (please pronounce as teak royce) on Anglesey is the fastest place we’ve raced at, the hot 2 strokes hit over 90 at the foot of the hill. And that’s a thing to wake you up, downhill and flat out and all you can see as the track runs away blind to the right is the sea in front of you. There is a proper pit wall to lean over to watch and to signal from. Signals range from “come in, your time’s up” to one of the No Fear boys mooning at other people’s sidecar passengers.

This is nearly up to date and maybe gives a vague taste of the many headed beast that is British Championship Moped Mayhem, but to finish here are a few random memories from over the years.

Some bloke at the original race eating some sort of Chinese health food salad being asked why he was eating his bike’s wiring —- the NSU Quickly with the bus turbocharger casing —- being given a can of lager by Roger Willis, Bike’s editor at Peterborough, as an emergency first aid measure —- the upstairs room at the Station Hotel in Langbaurgh being so hot that sweaty T shirts shone like PVC —- the Forks Ache boys limping up from London in an Escort with a slipping clutch and the locals pitching in to fix it instead of just legging it down the pub —- pub gaffers thinking they’d got enough in , wrong, more wrong than a big bag of wrong things —- the lump in the throat at the start of a sidecar race at Blyton when all the outfits turned out for a 1 hour on the rally school section (farmer thought “mopeds? Dirt is OK FOR 20 mph” and double booked us on the Saturday the 1st time we were there —- Dave Child’s unrepeatable 720 degree highside that left him facing the right way and at the same speed as he started it on his Melody —- Dave again, 93 Blyton, the generator shearing of the end of the crank and overtaking him like a midget bouncing bomb —- Pembrey and the Rothman’s Bendits crashing, this is the only word for it, relentlessly —-

Steve Lorriman’s Fantic with no go, brakes or steering so we just stamped down the box and chucked it sideways to slow down and slid using the fossilised tyres to build speed up in the corners —- an AR rider baling out vertically when somebody dropped it in front of him, then starting to run at 60mph , he got 3 Jonathan Edwards type strides in before inertia turned him into a spinning thing —- Dave Knight still owes me a pint after winning £5 betting which lap I was going to fall off on —- a female paramedic thumping a fallen rider for saying “we’ve got to stop meeting like this” —- Team Blobby —- Team Ermintrude, pink bike, overalls, beer cans, food, anything stationary near them for more than 5 minutes —- Kensington And Knightsbridge Gentlemen’s Autocycle Society in full black tie get up and their table with candelabra & champagne bottle in a cooler in the pits —- Baldric of the Bury Bandits allegedly running off to America owing money to Celestial Persons of Windsor —- Robert Cooper in a state of hysterical shock when he thought he’d killed his old man in a sidecar crash (failed unless I’ve been hanging around with a zombie all this time) —- the hangovers, the raw awful shuddering monstrous hangovers —- churning guts while you wait on the start line for the race to start and then the dry mouthed banzai of the next 6 hours —- triumph and despair side by side —- burnt finger engine changes —- shooting down the paddock on a sidecar with no brakes or chance to make the right hander before it and missing everyone there —-