BLOG: A very surreal day

So this week we’re deep in the middle of hunting down some new bikes that are on the distant horizon, digging around in hushed conversations with factory people who should really know better but still like telling us what’s coming up, when a quick conflab with the boys shows that the various industry conversations happening on the newsdesk keep getting steered towards the 800cc MotoGP rules.

We might be in the position of breaking stories one or two years ahead of what you’re seeing now in the local shop window at the moment, but right now the biggest rumbles are about what’s going to happen after the MotoGP class goes to a smaller capacity next season – and the resulting product fall-out for the rider on the road.

There’s lots of big old red herrings out there about which prototype road bikes are up and running and we’re steering carefully through them right now, but more and more factories seem to be at least talking about the class as a probable route for them to shift more bikes – it’s just a rumble at the moment, but there’s definitely more than one factory talking about it, and most of those who are having a think are main players in the industry.

But talk about your weird day on the desk today, we’ve been working on a major scoop that is about to break next week – which you’ll see soon in MCN – so there’s been some strange phone calls between us and the States (trust me, this’ll make sense when the story breaks) and as we’re putting down the phone to one famous biking name after another we’ve had Chris Walker and James Toseland sitting in with us having a natter about the biking world in general (they’re in the office for our big Silverstone WSB preview).

We could have ended up playing famous-biker-bingo this morning, it was that surreal by mid-morning.

Highlight of the day was seeing JT watch some old video footage of The A-Team’s Mr T signing a song to his mum on a video file sent to the newsdesk this morning, like I said a very surreal day – he kept saying that he couldn’t believe that Mr T was singing, the musician in JT was obviously struggling to get to grips with the concept.

If you fancy checking out the video yourself click here and find out what tickled JT so much.

If you have any thoughts you’d like to share with us, feel free to email us at mcn.news@emap.com