A Little Scrambler History…

While the modern scrambler scene is easily defined by turn-up jeans, fashionable haircuts, and excessive price tags, there was a time when scrambling was about the act of actual off-road riding rather than Instagram pictures and retro clothing. When motorcycles were first becoming popular, there wasn’t a hell of a lot of variety between models. You either had a motorcycle or you didn’t. And like all forms of transport, people wanted to push what they had to their limits in the form of challenges and races.

In the early days, particularly in the late 1920s in Britain, riders enjoyed racing from check point to check point across the countryside. Rules were few and far between but the general aim of the game was to get from one place to another in the fastest time, over whatever obstacle and terrain happened to be in the rider’s way. Fields, hedges, hills, streams, woodland, and a lot of rain – those the primary ingredients of the British countryside, and since the motorcycles of the day weren’t particularly adept at churning up dirt and thrashing across unpaved roads, conventional road-focused motorcycles needed to be specially adapted to their new purpose. Thus the earliest scramblers were born.

The scrambler scene as we know it today was pretty much born out of the Mojave Desert in California during the 50s and 60s. Since there weren’t any real dirt bikes available back then, those in the know would take your standard big single 500s or 650 parallel twins and strip the back to the bare minimum, fit them with longer suspension, give them higher handlebars, and swap out the road tires for a set of knobbly off-road rubbers instead. Thanks to the new modifications, these new motorcycles were able to traverse tough terrain in a way that regular motorcycles just couldn’t handle. Thus the scrambler was born.