Scooter Racing

Don’t be put off by the title because scooter racing is a serious business and the machines are faster than you think! How does 0-100mph in 9 seconds sound?

Scooter racing has been around in one form or another since the early sixties, the sport was predominantly populated by geared Italian made Vespa’s and Lambretta’s but in recent years highly tuned modern automatic scooters (which you can see in any town or city) have made quite an impact on the race scene and they can be found swapping paint with classic scooters as the riders jostle for position out on the hectic race tracks.  

The sport is run in the UK by the British Scooter Sport Organisation or BSSO as its known and they travel to many well known circuits around the UK every year. Popular meetings include Cadwell Park, Darley Moor, Croft and Lydden Hill. The BSSO share meetings with various bike clubs so as well as 2 or 3 solo scooter races during the day you’ll also get to see scooter sidecar races and a full programme of bike racing, not bad for the £10 admission fee.

At a meeting the solo scooters all race in one class, (with results being split at the end of the meeting) so you’ll have 24 scooters of various capacities on track at the same time. The traditional geared scooters are between 150-250cc (depending on class) and will reach speeds of around 100 mph; they also carry plenty of corner speed so their lap times are often a match for the bikes! The automatic scooters fall into three main classes, the 70cc class is mostly made up of Piaggio Zips; the up to 180cc class usually fields Gilera Runners and Italjet dragsters, as does the Specials class. ‘Specials’ can be heavily modified and virtually anything goes! For 2007 a new street class will be introduced where road going scooters can compete, limited modifications and tuning are allowed, for more info check out www.scooterracing.org.uk

The 172cc automatic scooters are unbelievably fast on track, they accelerate like missiles and on a Dyno the top scooters can do the ton in less than 10 seconds! Most of the top machines are fitted with heavily tuned Malossi kits, big carbs, racing exhausts and a whole load of suspension and
braking mods. Despite the high levels of tuning the scooters are usually reliable and are still fairly cheap to build. Get yourself a secondhand Gilera Runner for £500, spend £2k having an engine built and you’ll be able to compete with the best of them. A season’s scooter racing is probably one of the cheapest forms of motor-sport available and it is highly addictive! The sport has also kick started the careers of a couple of household bike racing names in the past, including Leon Haslam and James Toseland so if you fancy a future career in bike sport, scooter racing isn’t a bad place to start and you only need to be over the age of 11 to take part, so pester your Dad until he takes you racing!  

If you’d like to see an on board video of scooter racing in action click this link and hold on tight…
 http://www.psn-scooters.co.uk/