Offroad Riding

I am going to talk about offroad riding from the local context. Offroad riding activity started in the country in the 60s. The Royal Australian Airforce personel were generally responsible for it. Based in Penang,they built a motocross track in Teluk Bahang and conducted weekend racing among themselves. They would also organised weekend offroad outings to the nearby forest. Naturally the locals got interested and the sport began to grow. Among the local participants then were our famous ex-racers Bulldog Kwan and Oh Ka Beng. Motorcycles used were basically modified British road bikes and a few Spanish Ossa and Montessa. Many of the bikes were brought in by the Australians when they were posted to Malaysia. Japanese had not started building dedicated offroad machines yet at the time.Only in the early 70s,Japanese bikes i.e Suzuki TS,Yamaha RT,Honda XL and Kawasaki KE were made available. Hence began new interest in offroad riding. Dedicated Japanese motocross bikes were imported in the early 80s and the sport of motocross grew with many participants taking part. The popularity of the sport remained until the early 90s when the sport began to decline.It was also partly due to sanctioning issues. In the meantime many recreational offroading were organised by small riding group all over the country. Most of the machines were of the trailbike,enduro and MX varieties. The sport was eventually killed when the price of new imports went up skyhigh coupled with high import tax structure. We as riders had to face reality and either changed our interest or just have to make do with any cheap available bikes in order to continue. The sport now belongs to the super rich and the same goes for our road counterpart.Some business people got smart and started to smuggle in dirtbikes in containers and sold them to desperate dirt bikers. We do not condone this act. Illegal bikes would eventually put you in trouble and the sport especially motocross cannot progress properly without legitimate machines.Hence the prosper of homemade cubcross machines which also dampened the proper progression of the sport of Motocross and dirt biking in general. Lets forget about motocross competition which is not really conducive for our application.Even in western countries the most popular form of offroad sport currently is vintage racing. Old machines are resurrected and used in friendly competition. It is more fun and cheap.
There has been a second wave of interest in offroading lately with the availability of legal/affordable machines in the market. It is good that some manufacturers/importers see this market segment and not entirely concentrating on underbone market. At least our sport can survive and maintain its existence in this country. There is still hope yet.