Stunt riding is about style, acrobatics, body and motorcycle control at the very highest level, combined with tricks and move combinations. All including the 200 kilos and 100 bhp of the motorcycle, which have to be tamed using throttle, clutch and brakes.
The Brazilian Antonio Carlos Farias is regarded as one of the founding fathers of the sport. He started back in the early nineties, performing crazy freestyle tricks on empty parking lots, doing every possible and impossible wheelie and stoppie imaginable. An old VHS cassette and the internet brought these new-style moves as far as Halblech im Allgäu, where a not untalented off-road motorcyclist happened to be sitting out an injury and so had plenty of time to watch television.
And what Chris Pfeiffer saw flickering across his screen cast such a powerful spell on him that that was all he ever wanted to do from then on: stunt riding. The centre of this sport continues to be the warm, dry USA which now has the biggest scene. Here more is done than anywhere else to work away at eliminating the laws of gravity.
However, for many years the grand master in reversing Newton’s laws has come from the Allgäu. Chris Pfeiffer is right at the forefront of the sport, living, training and developing it to take it to the next level. Talent, feeling, innovation, creativity and the unfaltering will (or toughness) to get back on again and again to try once more: this is what has made Chris the worldwide champion and undisputed master of ceremonies in stunt riding on his BMW F 800 R.
The number of titles he has won to date is huge, but what really counts for Chris and makes a day worthwhile for him, is when a new trick or a new combination has been performed successfully. This makes him content in his soul – until it occurs to him how he might improve the trick soon afterwards. The development simply never stops.
Stunt riding is a freestyle sport in which the individual style, the fluidity of the performance (the “flow”) and the richness of variation is evaluated by a jury by means of a score. The rider has a flat asphalt surface of at least 50 x 15 metres and a time limit of a few minutes, with pumping music roaring out of loudspeakers to accompany the show.
The bike has to have a capacity of at least 600cc and two cylinders, a so-called wheelie bar protects the rear from scraping the ground and the rear wheel brake mounted additionally on the handlebars secures the bike from tipping over backwards during a wheelie, in case (during a trick) the rider’s right foot happens to not be where it was supposed to be – namely on the brake pedal.
Chris’ BMW F 800 R is mainly characterized by high-class standard components as well as a silken soft engine response in every situation. No matter what the angle to the ground, the gear or the engine speed, the F 800 R pushes on but never cuts out or stalls.
