I was somewhere on the Grimsthorpe Castle estate , about two miles into the Malle Super Scramble, when a shadow loomed out of the blinding white dust.
Suddenly, this shadow morphed into the rider in front, who threw his fist into the air to halt the impending onslaught of hundreds of riders closing in from astern. I threw the bike into second gear, tamped the brakes as hard as I dared on the talc-soft sand and came to a rolling stop.
As the dust began to settle around the scene in front of me, I could see, between spoked wheels and booted legs, three figures slithering and crawling away from the gravel in a crooked attempt to escape from the rolling rubber.
Some riders stopped to help drag the mangled metal from the track as others tended to the fallen men desperately scrambling to the sanctuary of the grass beyond the fence.
As I rolled past the scene, I caught glimpses of a patchwork of unidentifiable fluids seeping into the ivory white gravel. I kicked the Hero Xpulse back into gear before the fear had me screaming back to safer climbs and the scene melted away back into the mists.
It was well past midday when I arrived in a flurry of Euro 5+ muted exhaust note on Hero’s small, affordable and improbably game Xpulse 200. So I rushed to the nearest spot I could find in the sprawling campsite, pitched my Oxford Micro Tent in record time, ripped all the Nomad luggage off the bike and sped off down to the main arena – called the Mile Metropolis Base camp – with all the grass-riding confidence of a skittering newborn fawn.
Bikes of all kinds blasted past me in swirls of dust, and I felt the frenzied excitement of over two and a half thousand riders and the buzz of their engines filling the air.
The Metropolis centred around a haybale-lined oval arena that staged all sorts of events, from Moto-Polo (motoball to many), to the late-night, morbidly captivating Motorcycle Jousting.
In a state of frenzied overwhelm, flicking through the list of 27 events and races for the day, I was glad to spot Malle Co-Founder Jonny Cazzola chatting next to his glinting canary-yellow Steve McQueen-esque Metisse. After a quick look over the day’s events together, he put me onto the day’s busiest and most raucous, the 12.4-mile, 200-ish motorcycle-strong, Super Scramble as the perfect baptism of fire. If I could get through this unscathed, the rest of the weekend would be a doddle.
At the starting line just outside the imposing Grimsthorpe Castle, the air pulsed with pistons, testosterone and the faint whiff of fear. As I looked back, I could see nothing for a sea of glistening helmets, handlebars and two-stroke smoke.
At the front of the pack were Cazzola and his cousin and co-founder Robert Nightingale. After a bit of faffing, the two swung their legs over their saddles (Cazzola on his Metisse and Nightingale a Malle branded Bear 650 ), kicked the bikes into gear, bumped fists and took off, with the ocean of metal and flesh speeding behind them in quick pursuit.
After being halted in the blinding dust and rolling past the three fallen men, the adrenaline in my veins pushed me on as the track took a turn onto grass and the dust soon cleared. I opened the Hero up into third gear and was able to rip past a trundling Suzuki VanVan that had been bobbling about a few yards ahead.
If I had any thought that I might actually be competent at this sort of off kilter scrambling they were soon dashed as a marauding gang of leopard print spangled XL250 riders st…