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A Short History of Nodding Dogs C90 Racing It has to be short really – it only began in 2005. It sprang from the collective boredom of a small group of people on a tiny website called Nodding Dogs. It isn’t your normal biking site and it tends to be a little unusual in what it finds amusing and interesting. Which is why, presumably, someone thought it would be, you know, really cool, to ride Honda C90s from John O’Groats to Landsend. Camping under the stars, bonding round a campfire, drinking bad wine, and pulling wheelies in unison down the A386. All for charidee, of course, to make it seem legitimate. Before you could say “Eejits!”, Ebay was scanned, various delapidated C90s were bought for beer money and we all felt it was going to happen. Until reality set in. The reality of getting everyone to take weeks off work at the same time, leaving the wife, the job, the kids and the mortgage to look after themselves. And, as the idea rapidly lost its appeal, leaving us with the question of what to do with a load of C90s ? Easy. Race them off-road, someone said. And to make it doubly hard, make it four hour endurance races. Quite how things moved on from a moderately amusing joke to the reality of a field just outside Birmingham, is a little foggy. These things have a hidden momentum of their own, you know ? Suddenly, teams were formed, a charity was suggested. (The Brittle Bone Society.) Rough rules were drawn up. And a website was set up. A lot of talk was talked and before we knew it, it was the Day. Round One of The Nodding Dogs C90 Endurance Championship. (Such an impressive title for a bunch of fat, unfit blokes on buggered-up bikes.) All the teams turned up, bar one, people rode, crashed, crashed again, blew up, broke down, broke ribs, (mainly through laughing so much) and there was a winner, much merriment, much drinking and much cash raised. Three rounds, more broken machines, more merriment, more drinking, more pain and more than £8000 later, we found we had inadvertently created something worth continuing. Which is exactly what we did in 2006. We had more teams, more riders, tightened up the rules, introduced official speedos for each bike to solve the problem of malfunctioning OE odometers, supported a new charity (Asthma UK), got a little more professional, (proper flags !) were made famous by a five-page feature in FastBikes magazine, printed and sold our own calenders for 2007 and raised nearly £8000 for wheezing geezers. For 2007, there will be yet more teams competing, more C90s being trashed, more swearing, sweating, bleeding and bruising, and more cash raised for the Fragile X Society. I doubt it’s possible to have more fun, but we’ll die trying. |
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