First there was Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines. Then came the Merry Pranksters. After that there was the Wacky Racers, the Cannonball Run and Burning Man. Now here’s the Sultans of Sprint…

For twenty years Laurent Kesteloot and Pascal Demeulemeester obsessed over custom motorcycles. They read magazines. They watched shows. Then they realised it was about time they have a crack themselves, and the clever pair started KD Motorcycles…

They’re called the ‘Sultans of Sprint’ and the asphalt 1/8th mile is the troposphere where they do battle, on bikes as bananas as those old planes. Very few fulfil that centuries old ethos like Belgium’s Bernard Mont and in 2018 he’s returned with a lay down and mash the gas…

In the pocket of Western Europe that includes France, Belgium and Switzerland, endurance racing is a way of life. Small teams and factory-backed giants meet at some of the world’s most famous circuits, like Spa and Magny-Cours, to battle it out for up to 24 hours straight. One such event, the Bol d’Or, holds a special place in the hearts of Belgians where from as early as 1927 the small nation has tasted success. For Deep Creek Cycle Works from Diepenbeek, they don’t only build custom bikes but come the weekend they take their love of racing to the track where they compete in the European Classic Endurance Racing series. So when one of the race crew members was after a new ride for the street, it made perfect sense to build a 1981 Honda CB750 Bol d’Or road rocket, a bike they fittingly called the ‘Bol Noir’.

With the big manufacturers, corporates and TV shows dedicating large sums of money to the custom motorcycle scene it is easy to forget that its foundation has and always will be home builders on tiny budgets scrummaging through scrap yards for that must have part. We can all dream of our ultimate ride, a $100k to spend and the skills of the words great fabricators at our disposal but the reality for most of us mere mortals is a few grand for both bike and bits. As a 21 year old student from Liège in Belgium, Jordan Froidmont found himself in this very predicament but has found a way to make his dreams come true with a little left field thinking and a lot of hard graft. After three years of work he’s turned Honda‘s forgotten FT 500 Ascot into a stunning street bike and is now filling the Belgian air with the sound of a screaming single.

It’s been four months an a brand new wall calendar since the last AMD World Championships in Cologne, and yet we’re still turning up some genuinely great bikes that were previously hidden deep within the winning ranks. Here’s one from Belgium that’s been handcrafted in a basement by a Mr. Quentin Vaulet, or as he likes to call his nocturnal garage adventures, “Charging Lion”. “It’s a personal project (and a pretext) for which I completely surrender myself to the creation of motorcycle”. Fitting then that this, his latest bike, is called “The Thief”; by the looks of it, she owes Quentin more that a few hours. Much more.