Team 525 Amageza 2015 - videos and some recaps (better late than never)

[Kamanya]

There had been lots of talk over beers but it was in January that we got serious and plonked cash down for the entry fees. We had till August to get to the start line. It seemed so far away….

The next is not in chronological order but to get to the start line here’s more of the mayhem that had to happen….

All of us were trying furiously to get fit too.



Ian, Scott, Justin and Aidan did a few enduro’s and mountain goating





No pain no gain







And eating healthily…





Robert getting the kinks worked out of the bashplates













My friends from the seatcover place, Escape Gear came up with a great little tool roll that fitted in the bash plate.







We did some mockups for Petronas who very nearly supported us





Aidan is a presenter for Top Billing and Man Cave, he really put us all to shame by getting his networking to cough up some cold hard cash in return for some content for the Man Cave program. We would ride around in Atlantis and give some insight to what rally is about whilst wearing Builders Warehouse, kit and in return the cash enabled us to buy a support entry for 4 crew and for two backup vehicles and cover the diesel costs for the 7000k’s. This was a massive win for the team.



I still haven’t seen that video!


As to the look, there were furious back and forths about looks. Myself, Justin and Robert are a bit clueless on looks, but Scott, Aidan and Ian had some pretty strong ideas on what would look great;

The riding tops



The bikes



T-shirts



As we had second hand bikes, some of us got some nasty surprises that fortunately cropped up before the race.



This was Aidans Bike… Click on this photo for the video!



All our bikes needed some form of work or another, Superfoxi was used a lot. The others will have to chime in, here’s mine as I got it on the 11 of Feb;



It was practically unrideable, the suspension had not been serviced forever and I was hugely disappointed with it. My 990 handled better.

So the rebuild started. I had my valves done with new Kibble White ones stuck in.





Superfoxi also did our suspension, yes my bike is in the lounge…



Setting sag on Justins bike at race weight



All the bikes got bigger footpegs



In Roberts case, he went a bought a spare bike. Scott on the other hand decided that rather than risk it, he bought a brand spanking new KTM 500.



Here it is in Justins garage getting some love with Aidans bike too



Ian had little to do as this was the bike that he’d ridden the previous year.



Julian on Supebike Solutions in the Strand offered to dyno our bikes for free to check their health. Lucky he did as Aidans bike needed some work.







The blue line is Ians 450, his made more power than the 525’s but it had to rev another 1500 rpm’s to do it. Torque talks though! The 525’s made more of it. Interestingly Justin’s made more lower down, then mine would catchup a little later with mine making the most torque.


Scott and Aidan are relatively useless at bike building to Justin spent some long hours putting these jewels together… that’s AM on the clock!



Many, many hours were spent spannering and fitting all the things needed to build a rally bike. I rewired mine



Just extending the bikes cluster took Justin 2 hours



I can’t tell you how many times, I would zip tie something into place only to cut it all off again because something wasn’t right. This is Jutins handy work, he a bit more OCD than me.



There were some near misses too. This is a copper washer, it fell down the spark plug hole on Justin’s bike. There was some very nervous faces when using compressed air and a pillow case to catch it.



It all added up, but there was a goal….

 

[JustBendIt]

:thumleft:

 

[GraZer]

This is a great report  :thumleft:

 

[Ganjora]

another epic andrew report.
:thumleft:

 

[Kamanya]

We spent a **** load of time on a proposals and meetingsfor sponsorship. As I’d never been exposed to media and what sponsors need in return for their cash, it was a steep learning curve. Media ROI Matrix’s, Rights to footage, viewer impressions, etc. I sat in boardrooms with PowerPoints and Marketing directors who loved the ideas but the finance guys would throw spanners. Having a complete rally bike parked just outside their foyer brings out the boy in everyone!



Aidan, Ian and Scott work in various ways with this world. Aidan is a TV presenter but also has a production company. Ian makes produces and makes films and adverts, Scott has a picture production company, (guys chime in if I’m getting this wrong). They did a huge amount of designing and making sure all what we put before potential sponsors looked great and sounded right.



I thought it would be an obvious thing and easy to convince people of just how necessary it was to throw large amounts of cash at 6 middle aged, petrol headed white guys who are doing something very niche. But as I soon found out, we weren’t made of rhino horn or contributed to a greener, less marginalised world where for, “R2 you too can feel good about contributing to alleviating nappy rash in poor communities”. ****, we needed R200k per oke just to break even!

It would have been great to get paid to ride, but our goal really was just to help with the costs, we thought R100k would be a great achievement. Every cent helps. Sadly, in rally, almost nothing is cheap!

So, we went with the human interest story, but the reality is that our story is only really interesting to our friends and concerned family and 25 000 other DS biking guys all feverishly clicking away behind their corporate desks dreaming of riding a Dakar one day.



Finding sponsorship is a tough, tough job. The bottom line to a sponsor, is – can what you do guarantee more money in my till?



In the end we (mostly Aidan) raised just under R70k cash, R50k of it was from Builders Warehouse. the whole amount was used just on backup!

Then we had a few very generous product sponsors help.

Extreme Lights were fun and overly generous with their exceptional products.

Julian from Superbike Solutions is a fellow petrol head and a library of technical info

Mike from Superfoxi, gave us discounted rates on his service

Trevor at ADV RIDER donated much needed bits that made life easier behind the bars

Chris of Flying brick has a bit of a rally bug and vicariously supported us through discounts and great deals.

Then there is   Adie and Mike of Rockfox. I could start a whole new thread on our dealings with them. So here’s a brief mention of our dealings with these two;

Very early in the game, just after the last Amageza, I lent Ardi my roadbook holder and some stage roadbooks. He was thinking of doing the Amageza. Before we knew it, he came up with not only his own roadbook holder but trip and CAP repeaters too! I thought they only made crashbars for bikes FFS!

Intrigued , I became a test mule for his little boxes of tricks.

One of the first prototypes








It was valuable to him having someone who’d ridden a rally before to give feedback on what worked and didn’t. I’d take his prototypes and go test them in Atlantis or Macassar and then ride/write back to him with feedback. This happened many times over the months, on just one occasion, these were my notes;

I took the bike over to his place and spent the morning with him trouble shooting. There were a myriad of issues; Vibration killers that broke electronics, voltage spike issues on start-up, GPS issues, programming bugs in the software, dead buttons, misalignment of pins for GPS, cable issues. But, all was handled with a furious can do attitude! Hell, he’s an incredibly bright and determined guy!

Apart from him putting it on his old GS, mine is the first bike that the units and buttons have been tested on. He’s behind because he’s so keen to get it right and have great functionality as well as having a steep learning curve with regards moulds and epoxies.

I’d bolt the units on and go around the block and come back with feedback on whatever was happening.

Between short rides, literally around the block to test ****, he rewrote the software, epoxied stuff in and came up with solutions so that we’d install and I’d be off again for the next circuit.

He sure can talk a lot, but he does put out huge productivity too. He’s got his son Mike and electrical oke working furiously on this too.

Anyway, the ride home was fun to have a really good looking and functional Trip and Cap with each also having a time, stage time, speed, max speed for stage, max speed for whole race.



It was epically impressive.

I was the only one in our team to run his kit mostly because the inevitable delays when creating something caused my less risk averse team mates to stump up for more commercial and tested units. It was a blessing disguise for Ardie as not only were they creating all this amazing kit, they were mad enough to be designing from the ground up, their own rally bike that they would race! Madness! Adie had an exercise cycle in his office that he could ride, test his kit, work and get fit all at the same time! Truely epic!



More on their kit later.

 

[Scooterbike]

:sip:

 

[W1P30UT]

:sip:

 

[Kamanya]

We’d always known that if we were going to do it as a team, we would have to have a support crew. Being a support crew is a flipping tough job. Firstly you have to deal with panicky, tired, grumpy, sore riders, after yourself having to drive thousands of k’s and getting little sleep. Then more importantly you have to be competent at swinging spanners. Making a mechanical mistake whilst helping to service the bike can have disastrous and even lethal consequences.  

In our circle there were a few tentative hands that went up, one of which is a member here, Bungycool on the forum or Jim my brother in law. He would have dearly loved to have been the 7th member of our team and complete an Amageza, the slight issue was that he is a Saffa plumber plying his trade in Glasgow. That’s Glasgow Scotland. The larger issue with riding the Amageza is my sister. He has 3 small kids and a fiercely protective Mother of them, so with the ruinous expense of rallying and risking his arse racing across a desert, his dream is going to have to wait a bit. But, the bug bit her last year when we had live tracking and she was glued to the little blue dot moving and inexplicably stopping in the middle of nowhere, so he got the pink slip to be next best thing, support crew. Meet Jim and Viv.



Jim is pretty good with plumbing but we also wanted a really experienced bike type mechanic for those times when some strong bike specific mechanical experience is a golden thing.

Jim said he had an Irish mate who is keen and is very good with bikes. Hmmmm, what are the chances of two overseas guys coming over to drive trucks and swing spanners and one of them being what we needed? We had our doubts, so I wrote to his mate Tim, the mails are far too good not to post it here;

Hello Tim,

Jim has said good things about you and that you are handy with a hammer.

As you may know we are a team of 6 competing in this year’s Amageza. Jim’s a bit of a groupie and he may have sold all the upsides…

We have a bit of a dilemma in that the mechanically gifted assistants that wanted to come cannot commit as yet. We have in the meantime been getting our feelers out for those that we would like to come along who have a bit of nous for our needs.

We also are at a crossroads with a potential sponsor that would make a big difference to how we play the game and what we take along. It affects us as to whether we have 2 vehicles or 3. This has huge impact on costs as each extra person and vehicle pays to enter whether they are racing or support.

So, I am curious;

Having put the possibilities into context, we are interested but would like to have a bit of background and what do you know and care about motorbikes and if you have any experience on KTM EXC’s and EXC-W’s. We will be running a 2012 FI 450 & 2016 500 EXC-W’s and 4 x RFS 525’s all lightly modified for rally.

Also, what’s your motivation to submit yourself to 7-10 days of dust, desert, rally support, sleep deprivation, gentle abuse and tents. And all this where you’ll not get paid and have to buy your own beer and may very well end up with maybe just a T-shirt and memories.

What do you bring that we should sit up and say, “**** yeah, he’ll do!”

Though we can be bribed with a **** load of cash that’s not really the point.

Please be assured that though we are interested, even we are not quite sure which way this is going to pan out. Either way, I will let you know what is happening as soon as we do.

Regards,

Andrew Johnstone

His epic reply

Hi Andrew and All

Thanks for the email the opportunity to   let me outline my skills , motives , experience  and answer the question why would I want to spend 10 days been dirty, sleep deprived ,  spannering bikes late into the night, driving 2000km  while  been abused by cranky races etc …………

I have watched all the videos of the rally I could find and read some of the web pages  and my impression of this rally that is pretty well run event that is growing and getting more professional and more serious every year and will soon be a major international event.

I have attached photos of the warehouse my brother and I use as a ‘toy box’ or ‘man cave’ so what I am  outlining is true and not my opinion about myself!!







My main passions as motor bikes, rebuilding engines/ anything mechanical and boats

I started of sailing as a kid  and had completed my first transatlantic by the time is was 17 , in a 60ft trimaran ( I was first mate / engineer, no heating, no toilet, no bunks for 19 days) with a crew of three. I spent about 3 years fulltime working as a boat builder / engineer  and sailor working on everything from toilets , air-conditioning , winches  , engines , gearboxes fiberglass and carbon …….. so a broad range of stuff .  I use to spanner for a fellow SA guy Neal Peterson and use to do two handed  boat delivery’s between Europe and Ireland and the UK.   BTW sailing in northern Europe is cold , wet and huge test of endurance , even in summers its 3 layers of clothes and sun glasses are to look cool not for eye protection !

I rebuilt my first engine at the 15 , which was a marine engine that had spent 9 month underwater and 2 yrs in a  shed ……. I had to beat  get the pistons out with a sledge hammer and a leg of a chair!!!  It was rebuild and  ran for 10 years in a boat .

I have been a lifelong biker ….. I spent years spannering  them to keep them going and ended up doing it for my friends also ( it amazing how many friends you gain when you can fix something ) .

About 6 years ago I took up short circuit racing, ( I do OK I am at the back of the Pro grid , the front is TT stars and some BSB riders)  I do all my own suspension spring changes and rebuilds , engine work  , and everything else  including engine tuning , polishing and porting , crash repairs etc … there is no part of a bike I am not comfortable touching.

In the photos you will see a CRF250 , which I have done valve clearances  and a piston change , the ‘73 Husky ( my brothers  ) I did a full rebuild on about 2 years ago  including getting a Czech engineering company to build a custom ignition system for it .   it started 3 kick !!!!  . Yes,  I  use the Lathe ……

Why I would be Good for you Guys…………………….

•         I have a full driving licence for every category of vehicle you can drive in  Europe ( I like driving )
•         I am use to been part of a team including  the dynamics and personality’s involved ,  living for extended periods in **** conditions  and close quarters under stressfully situations  and still get on with everyone.
•         I am very easy-going , social  and slightly extroverted , and can tackle any situation thrown at me.
•         I club race  and am use to repairing crashed bikes to race again , with tape , cable ties and making things work with limited resources ( try the middle of the ocean for coming up with interesting solutions)
•         I don’t have an ego and am  use to ruffing it with a smile , and I have no problem following team orders.
•         I understand that you guys have spent a ton of cash  and have been planning this for a year  and that for seven days you will resort to anything , including selling a kidney , to keep you and your bike going  to the finish line and I will support that all the way.

I assuming the  daily  routine will be along these lines :

Getting bikes and riders ready for start
Make sure racers  get away ok
Packing up the camp and moving to the next meeting point
Assisting bikes/ riders  on route as necessary

At the end of race day :

Checking bikes over assess  repairs that need to be done.
Changing tyres / checking wheels / bearings
Change oil and filters
Cleaning air filter
Clean, check and lube chain
Double check bike , loose bolts etc
Prep bike for racing the next day
Check everything again

Why…….

I am a bad tourist ,  this is an opportunity for me to go and see a part of Africa , while doing something constructive, positive and I get to go on the piss and the end of the race, with an achievement  celebrate  !   I have followed the Dakar since been a kid , so I want to experience desert racing up close and personal , and hopefully end up getting  to do the Dakar in race support role. This would be a stepping stone I hope.

So in summary , I am easy going , social guy ( aka good to go on the piss with) with a ‘can do’ attitude and the ability to fix just about anything  , who doesn’t mind lack of sleep and living in **** conditions while supporting others to compete in  a race .

I haven’t actually worked on the KTM 525 , but I  have started to reading  the workshop manual to get familiar with them  and will download the 450 one too, but with 6  guys knowledge on the team around these bikes , it shouldn’t be too hard.  

I understand that you have put out the feelers and come to decision that suit your guys the best, So if you have any questions please  email or call .

Jim told me you were asking if I had ******** ………. I don’t , but I can bring photos and regale plenty of story’s about them !!!!

Kind Regards

Tim Gunning

Well, that sat our team up, with **** Yeah! He’s in!

Some of my reply;

Ok, Tim

By a very narrow margin of 6 to 0 you were voted in, pending a stool sample and 2 back teeth.

Pack your bags, you’re going Rallying! In Africa nogal. (see translation issues below)

As part of the team we will include you from now on in all the team emails and WhatsApp messages. (It’s mostly rubbish and abuse so you’re welcome to opt out. Also there is some Afrikaans in there that we expect you to have mastered the basics of by the time we go racing – some of the areas that we’ll be travelling in they only use a smashed version of English in extreme emergencies and self-defence, but generally enough brandy and coke will make you fluent enough)

As for dates, please get together with Jim and work out your flights.

I am not sure of visa requirements but we are going to Botswana, so you need to find out if you need visa’s and any medical shots. There is no malaria where we are going so don’t worry about that, but Robert and Scotts bites probably need some strong prophylactics.

We will have all our own tools and ****, but if you have a favourite hammer that you like to sleep with, there’s nothing stopping you bringing that.

There are probably a million questions and suggestions that you have so fire away, our help desk has a reasonably quick turnaround time depending on whether we are out riding or drinking. Just keep the reply’s away from sensitive eye’s and ears, Justin has a potty mouth attached to an equally perverted and disgusting brain.

So meet Tim “Torns” Gunning, the 8th member of team 525.




We needed at least 2 more bodies that would be an asset to the team. Justin came up with the brilliant idea of auctioning the seats on the forum. And so we did. What we didn’t tell the forum was that we needed two and made it seem there was only one seat.

https://wilddog.net.za/forum/index.php?topic=176923.0

We would let it run till the cutoff date that Alex had where we would have to submit names of our support team. Then we were going to have a get-together for forum guys to see our bikes at a pub in Woodbridge Island and the highest bid before 8pm 7th August 2015. Many were interested but two guys seemed serious – forum members Rubiblue and Lj111 – had a battle. Lj111 stopped bidding at R4k.

There was a good turnout

Scott was overseas and Robert was welding

Later that evening and being slightly drunk,



we called both Chris and Lourens to tell them that Chris had the highest bid at R4500 – that the he was coming with us. The consolation prize for Lourens being the second highest bid and would also be in a seat on our backup crew

The good news was that both bidders would pay the second highest bid of R4000 each.

Meet the complete support team, Chris, Jim, Lourens and Tim that without a doubt were what made our Amageza great.

 

[Ross Riddle]

Awesome read.
Any of those bash plates available, still?

 

[Kamanya]

Awesome read.
Any of those bash plates available, still?

Not sure, Justin will know, send him a PM

 

[pubgrub]

JohnnyKamanya, stop fartarsing around and give more RideReport. Its been 2 days!

 

[Ross Riddle]

Thanks Justin sent me the number and I am now sorted with a bash plate.
Agreed we need to get this ride report going, waiting is killing.