TRACKIN’ BACK TO ROAD

We’ve all been there, with some money burning a hole in our pockets, trawling the internet looking to blow the lot on a motorbike. Unless you’re particularly well heeled, there’s always a limit to the budget and therefore a limit to what your options are to fill the space in your garage with, which more often than not leads to a degree of disappointment that the newer/more powerful/better equipped/ lower mileage version will have to wait for another time. But there is another way to get more bang for your buck, much more… buy a track bike or race bike and put it back on the road.

Thanks in part to the rise in popularity of track days, especially over the past 15 years, the associated boom in aftermarket performance parts and endless amount of information in print and online on how to convert a road bike into a track bike, the second-hand bike market now includes a massive choice of track bikes. The benefit of buying a track bike for the road is that in almost every single case, it will have been modified to make it more powerful, lighter and handle better; they are all – or at least all have the potential to be – much better versions of the road bike they started life as. The other big benefit is that they are always cheaper than the equivalent road bike, but there are reasons for that. One of them is that almost exclusively they will have been stripped of essential things for the road, such as headlights, brake lights,