Front End Chatter #95

Hello and welcome to Front End Chatter and the 95th outing for Britain's most stubbornly random motorcycling podcast, suspended as ever between the 48mm upsidedowners of bikesocial.co.uk – the world of motorcycling in a webby nutshell – and the fully adjustable monoshock of Bennetts, the bike insurance experts. And what a weird podcast we have this week, as two – well, one – of Britain's funniest, smartest, sassiest and damn amazing moto journalists – that's him, Martin Fitz-Gibbons, with me, Simon Hargreaves – discuss subjects as widely disparate as: • how MotoGP from Mugello (remember that?) was won by a man who used to race an EXUP who did what at the wettest TT ever, including how Peter Hickman used an S1000RR engine he didn't use, why it was a hybrid bike but not a hybrid engine, and why Harrison, not Dunlop, won the Dunlop Senior, on Metzelers, not Dunlops why John McGuinness might want to check the details of his Norton pension plan why FEC probably holds the lap record for the North Coast 500 the practical and psychological merits of air-bag suits is it a risk buying a new bike in the first year of production? does wearing hi-viz make you a fluoracist? why oh why isn't there a magazine website with videos and stories and everything (like, er, bikesocial.co.uk, maybe)? are any skills learned off road transferrable to road riding? is the polite biker nod a dying habit, and should you wave at other riders anyway? are racers made on the roads they grow up riding on? Thank you so much or listening, we really appreciate it – and please email your thoughts, ideas, questions and stories of helmet paint scheme inspired accusations to [email protected] Follow @Bennetts on Twitter and Insta and Facebook Follow @Mufga and @SimonHBikes on Twitter/Insta etc Laters taters.