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The Bike Show 2005
7th April 2005 - James
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For 2005 the Bike Show moved a few miles down the road to Stoneleigh Park, although a little more difficult to find the venue offers a bigger floor space for the stands and activities.
Now after being mauled by about 200 scooters trying to make our way through Coventry we finally made it to the venue.
We were pleasantly surprised by the huge numbers of people around and quite a few companies had made the journey to showcase their products and services.
New additions for this were the Gary Fisher learning dirt jumps and the 'test bikes' area which used a 4x4 track to allow you to test the bikes you were maybe thinking of buying.
We went for a quick wander around all the stands and checking out what people had on offer and what caught our eye.
Hope had a good stand this year, with plenty of stuff for bored hands to do.. like playing with the latest Mono discs or just drooling over the Hope trials and mini bikes on show.
Or you could have a play with the discs...
PDC Racing and ProjectLeeds are set to be a big force this year, with the lovely DH-One underneath their team riders, and with Oggy on board are set for good things.
.243 Racing were also showing off their new DH hardtail, for those of you who want to race without the difficulties of a complicated shock design.
Although the prototype of the 24-7 full susser does look a little..funky? (Is the chain supposed to used the swingarm as a chainguide?) They were putting on some pretty cool offers at their stand.. If you got there quick enough.
Peaty and the Royal Racing gang were there with Steve's new bike, will it be 224 or 225?
"You can be any size for BMX racing"
MBUK/Santa Cruz were also there showing off their team bikes, looking very nice in a fresh white paintjob.
So all in all, a pretty good show. Pity there wasnt any major representation from the bigger companies such as Specialized, Trek etc but a lot of smaller companies came out of the woodwork which was good to see.
No figures for the amount of people there yet, but it was pretty tight in places and there was loads of people watching the BMX & 4X racing on Sunday.
The halls were set out pretty well, although next year it may be a good idea to have the dirt jumping in one of the main halls? News of someone hitting the roof mid-backflip on Saturday didnt sound too good, and there were a few near misses come Sunday too..
The trials guys were working overtime with some crazy stunts going on, like dropping the front wheel out and riding the entire course with just a back wheel? And major props go out to Martyn Ashton who was pulling amazing backflips after such hard luck last year, well done that man!
See you next year!
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