BALANCINGACT

If I told you I can pull a decent wheelie on just about any motorcycle, I’d be lying. And if I told you I’m not secretly jealous of the very many of my peers who can, I’d also be lying. But the bit that has always stopped me from learning is, well, exactly that. Because a successful learning process involves spectacularly unsuccessful failures. And they’re the type of failures I’m not one bit interested in graduating from.

You see, my brain understands the forces and physics behind doing a wheelie, but when it comes to switching off my keen sense of self-preservation and physically executing a wheelie on the road, well that’s something else entirely.

That’s where Taras Cheprakov and his self-engineered Wheelie Machine comes in. A 25-year-old mechanical engineer who designed and built