How My Laziness (and Scooters) Got Me Into Cars

Hello Carmrades!

First of all, wish you all a powerful, but lightweight 2016! This goes for your cars and your lives!

Now, back on topic. As some of you already have seen, I have released another video today, with the main hero: a drag racing scooter.

For those who may find it interesting to find out, scooters are actually the reason why I got into cars, therefore they will always have a special place in my heart.

When I was 16, Scooters were highly popular among youth in Holland (country where I used to live), that was way before social media and importance to have “cool phone” etc. My thoughts about scooters back then were “meh, I’d rather save my money until I am 18 and buy myself a car”. Piece of confession here, back then when I knew nothing about cars, I was browsing ricer car ads.

Anyway, things changed when I got myself a job which was about 10 km (6 miles) away from my home with no public transport possibility. Going there by bicycle 30 minutes one way is a healthy thing, but sometimes annoying (and me being lazy). A friend of mine was selling a Yamaha Aerox for very low price and I just went along with it. Unfortunately at the moment of writing of this piece, my eHDD with all my childhood pics is unavailable, therefore some material is either lost forever or temporarily inaccessible. So here is a random pic of how an Aerox looks like.

Here is an entry-level modified version, something similar to mine.

Here is a riced out version.

Well, as you may have guessed, I could not leave the machine stock and this is where my passion with modifications of mechanical things started. Especially since my passion was ignited by a friend of mine who had a highly modified scooter. Trust me, the first time you hear a 14.000 rpm soundwaves hitting your chest, if you have anything petrolhead-related in you - you will fall in love in it. I made a promise to myself to become good at it and so it has begun. Two years later after hard working and saving money, I built a 22hp (on 50 kg) drag race scooter (switched Aerox to a Zip SP). But I wanted more than a fast machine, I wanted to master it. And that is how I got obsessed with wheelies.

And this is how it looks like when you go 100+ km/h (60+ mph) on a 10” wheel. This was before the scooter got painter pearlescent white with blue accents.

Loss of fear made those “launches” possible.

If you wonder how a “sportscar” perferms against a drag scooter, here is your answer:

Apart from wheelies, rolling burnouts were also my favourite

As the images above suggest, my scooter life was divided in 2 parts: legal drag racing in Dutch Drag Racing Championship and something that started as “less legal” with organizing local scooter meetings on remote locations, just like every average car meet. So what?

Well, back in 2008 I founded a scooter community named The Saints and started with organizing local events. Around that time Social Media started to emerge and that was my first experience of using it to promote something. Around that time, HD-format together with video editing and youtube became highly popular and that is when I bought my first camera, a Sanyo HD2000 camcorder and learned myself how to film and edit.

Who knows, maybe there would be no Boosted Boris, or at least not as you know him today if not for that.

Here is my last hoorah, when I organized Holland’s largest scooter meeting together with largest radio station 3Fm back in 2012. Check from 2:40 to see the size.

Now back to the drag racing.

Two years after my first participation in 2008, I switched from racing to organizing the drag racing events. A lot of factors contributed to drop in championship popularity, so I used my highly popular scooter club as PR to gain overall support and attention for the races.

But this is not what matters in this story. A part of the organization decided to take things to the next level and decided to organize serious drag racing for serious cars. Project Dutch Quarter Mile was born.

Here is a short fragment that illustrates how awesome it was, that will make you go WTF.

The cars line-up was tasty as well, EB110 SS, XJ220, F40, X-BOW and lots of more.

And we even had “our own Stig” in Europe’s first Nissan GTR.

Still, it could be a lot bigger. The main problem is that general spirit of Dutch people is being (maybe too) humble and not willing to show off. Luckily for us, this was the same year when the now world-famous Moscow Unlim 500+ drag races started to take place as well. Without much thinking we decided to head out to get ourself some participants for our event.

That was in 2010, but even today, 6 years later this image will astonish every petrolhead.

The good news: everyone was excited to come over. The bad news, we did not get any permission to use the unique location (Military Airfield) again and there were some troubles inside the organization, so the whole thing fell apart. Nevertheless, I have made lots of friends and got addicted to the new, but excited car world. Lots of interesting things happened after that as well, but those are another long stories.

For now I would like to finish this story with two messages for you to start 2016:

The smallest, at first unimportant, decisions in your life can have huge impacts on your future.

No matter how small something is, be big at it.