Miles: 10 hours
Mods: Cracked the mudguard, oops…
Wheelies. We all bloody love them and, for the most part, we’d all like to be better at them. Now, the way to get better at something is to keep practicing it. Again and again and again. But, to make your practice particularly effective and get the real improvements we’re all after, you have to overstep the mark time and time again. The trouble with over-stepping the wheelie mark on, say, a Triumph Daytona 675 is that if you don’t manage to catch it on the back brake, there’ll be a big bill waiting for you. Not so good. Enter the Montesa. The beauty of learning to wheelie the Cota is that, when you overcook it and go past the balance point, you can simply grab the clutch, step off the back and wait for the front wheel to crash back to the ground. Easy. Worst case, you fall on your bum, get muddy, perhaps bruised if you’re really unlucky, and leave the bike to its own devices. Being inherently clever, trials bikes will find their own way to stop and fall over, perhaps at the expense of a lever or rear mudguard, but never anything terminal.
All that development and technology and this is all we want to do with it. Wheelies: Awesome.
Now a wheelie is a wheelie, whether on a Honda C90, a Montesa Cota or a Fireblade, so the skills transfer across all three. We might not be wheelie pros yet, but the hours John and I have been putting in on the Montesa are already showing when we hop back on sports bikes and prance around in front of the camera. We just need to find a way not to have to do any work, so we can spend our days practicing on the Montesa. Sometimes even the best job in the world can get in the way…
Seconds before impact. I now have a lens-shaped bruise on my spine.