ELBA – Scooter Rally Toscano 25: RALLERY

Scooter Rally Toscano started a quarter of a century ago, but there are still people who have yet to sample its pleasures.

This year – the first after Green Onions SC’s revival of the event last spring – it was packed and harder than ever to secure ferries or accommodation.

If it’s on your bucket list, then best you hit it before you kick it.

More rally than expected

This year, Elba clashed, very inconveniently, with a car rally, which meant even busier boats and closed roads while 90 two-man teams hooned around the island in a vain effort to make as much noise, burnt rubber and fumes as a scooter rally. Good luck with that…

Hedging their bets

The lack of ferry ticket availability is, I’m certain, a ploy by the ferry companies to spread out bookings rather than everyone turning up at once for the prime sailings. There were no bike spaces left on any of the three ferry lines on Thursday. Rather than risking rejection, we took an easier option and booked a boat for Wednesday evening, given the cracking weather forecast.

One extra day on a fabulous Italian holiday island. Oh, if I must…

2-stroke terrorist

We are at a point in the life of this scene, where the flaming torch is being passed to a second generation of Scooterboys. The lucky ones of us are able to ride with our kids to events, show them the ropes and let them see the world through the eyes of a 2-stroke seaside terrorist. So it was for our group; this time riding with Thomas from our Club in Hamburg together with his son Johannes on his first ever ‘international’ scooter rally.

Twisties

For our 300km jaunt across the mountains from Rimini by Lambretta (a Quattrini M210 and a CP333 Sledge Hammer), Thomas joined us on his BGM RT225 Series 2 and Johannes rode a nippy little Vespa ET3 fitted with a Quattrini 140 kit: perfect equipment for a journey where 70% of the roads were twisty.

Moonscape

If you are vanning it, for heaven’s sake don’t bring a ‘clown bike’ that is no good for the terrain. While some areas of the island have relatively decent roads; all around the rally area is steep and like the surface of the moon, with potholes that will swallow an 8-inch wheel bike more easily than Stormy swallowed Donald. Allegedly.

The law of gravity

The reason it’s important to bring a capable scooter is that things are spread out, taxis are sparse and a scooter is perfect transport to get about while you remain sober. There’s more than one law to avoid if you are drink-riding, but the court of gravity is the most severe, with sentences that are harsh and immediate. As at least one Italian and one Scot can attest; gravel rash does indeed exist in Elba.

In the valley

Our digs this year – somewhere in the valley between the Mandel nightclub and the beach bar, proved the ideal location to host a small barbecue for some of our German clubmates and then saunter up the hill while the road to the campsite was closed to get a very up close and personal view of the nutters racing rally cars down towards the beach.

For some, trapped on the far side of Capoliveri, this was a massive inconvenience. For others – like us – it was a free additional spectacle on top of what are already spectacular views all over the island.

Missing the point

In some ways, Elba has much in common with The Isle of Wight. It is perfectly possible to enjoy the rally weekend without visiting the rally. It’s an island with enough to see that you don’t need to visit the official ‘do’ at the Mandel club of an evening. Capoliveri town centre is lively enough. That’s missing the point though – being too tight to get a wristband doesn’t just mean you miss out on the patches, stickers and entry to two proper ‘nighters’. It means you aren’t supporting the club who put the event on, and who book bands like Friday’s headliners The Molotovs.

The Molotovs

I never passed my music Journo exams, so I have no vocabulary to describe their insistent power-pop. Many people make comparisons to The Jam. Even if that style of furiously-delivered beat is not your scene – I always found the Jam a bit Marmite. I’m more of a Marmalade man – you can’t argue that the Molotovs have a massive stage presence. Not least of all for their bottle-blond leaping and Issey’s pouting and scowling. With all the press they’ve been getting, the Molotovs deserve to be very big. Elba, after gigs at Mersea Island, might be one of the few chances you get to see them on a rally as their career accelerates towards the stratosphere. If you want to know more, check out this article from Rolling Stone.

Music policy

The music policy at the Mandel club seems to run on a policy of lots of DJs, each playing one style for a set period of time, so you might get a 40-minute bowl of Soul before a jar of Ska, followed by a one-way-street of freakbeat, and so on.

A token amount

Anyone who visited the Holiday in Holland rallies in the 90s will be familiar with the venue’s infernal token system for buying drinks which means you either die of thirst or go home with a pocketful of unspent plastic discs.

Side note: this is the most expensive method ever of unchaining a trolley at the supermarket…

Back on the rally site for Saturday revealed a good spread of stalls for your wallet-emptying enjoyment: tattooists, a really good signwriting girl from Space Customs, the likes of Scooter Italiano and Pinasco, as well as a rally repair stall by Albi, but still no on-site welder. I had to return to the gate-building fabrication shop near Narengo who last year welded up Ricky and Maicol’s exhausts, this time to weld up the tailpipe on Tracy’s Gori box. I’m thinking of setting up a tab for the future.

Going loco

Come 3 pm the Mandel 2 beach bar becomes a hive of activity in preparation for the rideout; which this year took in some exciting, scenic and challenging roads around the next bay before heading for Porto Azzuro: where the entire carnival performed a comedy U-turn and returned to Capoliveri. There the Pro-Loco (the townsfolk) laid on a free aperitivo of food and a drink for anyone with a ticket from the rally pack to exchange.

If you like your ride-outs old school then you’ll love Elba, as it was still 90% Vespa and Lambretta with almost as many Heinkels as Chinese clones making up the rest of the fleet.

So far, Italy remains gloriously free of English businessmen, who’ve never ridden any distance on a scooter, telling scooterists what scooter they need to ride for their ‘Way of Life’. Long may that continue.

For me, Elba feels like the IoW rally is its 1990s heyday, inexplicably blessed by more sun than it deserves, housing a mix of Mods and Scooterboys, predominantly all on traditional scooters, chilling out and partying with abandon.

A moment in time

On Friday at 6 pm, when the last group of our German clubmates arrived on their long ride from Bolzano, Thomas and I were swimming in the sea 50 metres from shore, listening to the laughter, 2-stroke engines and soul music mingling with the gently splashing waves.

Tell me anywhere else in the world where you can experience that and I’ll see you there…

Sticky

Additional ride-out images by Tracy

Postscript. While the weekend was predominantly sunny, the ride home for many on Monday was pretty hard, trying and failing, to dodge the thunderstorms. If that’s the price of a great weekend then it’s still worth the cost.