Oakhanger lay host to the opening round of the 2023 Revo British Motocross Championship fuelled by Gulf. The circuit was specially built on Ministry of Defense land in Hampshire, and the photos didn’t lie about this spectacular circuit. With it’s mix of “bottomless beach sand, and some parts with a hard base (S. Edmonds)”, you would be forgiven for thinking you were in the depths of the Netherlands at a Dutch circuit, and not in the UK. The track looked awesome! There is something very special about the bark and ping of dirt bikes through the woods, and Oakhanger was no exception, as the layout streaked it’s way through the trees. Heavy showers fell on the Saturday when we got there to get set up, but the gods looked favourably on Sunday which remained mostly dry. It wasn’t enough to gift the riders with a smooth track however, as the numerous classes chewed their way through the sand to leave a deep and treacherous path, bad enough to catch out reigning champion Tommy Searle in the second race, leaving Harri Kulas to steam ahead to a 1-1 overall.
Motoklik had two supported riders on the day in Stuart Edmonds in the MX 1 class, and Jordan Kinsella in the Big Wheel 85.
Stuart had the switch to Honda earlier this year giving him a later start to the season than he would have wanted. Many laps around the Magilligan circuit in Ireland helped to prepare the Dubliner for the British opener. Qualifying was less than stellar at seventeenth, as a few small mechanical bugs acted as a distraction while Stuart got to grips with the track. Having used the Motoklik system to work a lot on suspension settings for his Showa A-Kit equipped race bike over the past few weeks, Stuart felt comfortable heading into race one. The start couldn’t have been much worse coming around the first turn with only four riders behind him in a class of twenty nine riders. Stuart got the head down, and started clicking off passes lap after lap to claw his way all the way up to tenth, with ninth in sight just up ahead. Unfortunately, the deep conditions and having to fight his way through traffic from the very first corner proved too much for his machine, and with two laps to go Stuart was forced to DNF race one. The race two restart proved to be much better for Edmonds as he rounded out the first lap in ninth. Some jostling for position through race two would see his standing fall and rise, before coming home in ninth, for sixteenth overall.
Up and coming Jordan Kinsella also made the switch to a red machine in the offseason, namely a GasGas MC 85, and has been working with us to develop and test the Motoklik system for the smaller capacity machine. Having worked through a few iterations over the winter, we finally landed on a design that we believed was up to task for racing at this elite level. It was a real trial by fire for the Motoklik system, with deep, abrasive, wet sand and long moto’s. Unfortunately, Jordan had been suffering due to illness in the week prior, putting him on the back foot coming into the weekend. He stayed committed and focused, qualifying in twenty fourth, finishing race one in twenty-sixth, and remaining determined to put in a stronger performance in race two for twenty-first when the track was at its toughest and roughest.
We’re proud to say the Motoklik system performed very well in these very trying and conditions, and shows that the development work we have put in is paying off to withstand this elite level racing. The Motoklik TW1.0 system is available to buy on our website, or you can message us if you have some further questions.