One 'Wicked' trike!
The Wicked Three is the most recent result of Showtime's strong relationship with Yamaha, a major sponsor of the Showtime Yamaha Freestyle Moto X Team for the past 4 years. Three years ago, the Showtime crew decided to do up a golf cart for Yamaha to display at the Australian Motorcycle Expo. The 'pimped' golf cart was a success, so Showtime were asked to build something for the following year - the result was the 'Wild Rhino' custom ATV. The bar had now been set for Showtime to come up with something even wilder for 2007.
Showtime's Gary Reid picks up the story. . .
"It all started when I was at Yamaha for a meeting and on the way out we passed a MT01 which I said would be fun to ride." Sean Goldhawk (Marketing Manager for Yamaha Australia) said "Why don't you take it and do it up for this year's expo?"
I took another look and not really having a clue what we could do, said 'sure, we'll get something done'!
"After getting it back to our Canberra workshop, my team and I started thinking along the lines of 'lets do it like a street fighter', but this had been done before and, for this bike, we wanted something that people would look at and just say 'What the hell is that?'.
"After about an hour of throwing ideas around I thought 'it's simple - lets take the same approach as we did for our lowrider (we'd just finished a lowrider custom car) - paint it matt black, slam it and put 20's onto it!
"One of our boys said 'I think we might struggle to get a 20 inch wheel on the front, and I said 'No, lets put two on the back'.
"So thats how the Wicked Three idea was born. From there, we custom fabricated a new headlight assembly, grafted a quad rear end onto it to fit the 20 x 8 inch Avanti Racing wheels, lowered it, added a custom rear fairing and drag-bike style exhaust and painted the whole bike in satin black.
"This wouldn't have been possible without the help of Brad and the team, Canberra Motorcycle Centre Smash Repairs and, of course, Yamaha and our Concepts by Showtime team."
Gary Reid www.showtimefmx.com
