By the end of Knockhill, Evan had raced Tom and Sammi’s KTM at the Anglesey 12 Hour, at Cadwell and now at Knockhill. It was starting to raise a question we hadn’t expected to be asking.
Up to then, the plan had been two Yamaha R6s for 2027. CF Motorsport were refreshing Evan’s R6, replacing the radiator damaged at Cadwell and building a second full race bike from a new R6 Race, one of the few new ones still available. We’d committed to all of it.
After Knockhill I spoke to Craig at CF Motorsport and explained the dilemma. We would honour everything we’d committed to, but both R6s would ultimately be going up for sale.
It wasn’t that the R6 had suddenly become a bad motorcycle. Evan was developing as a rider and the results would have come on the Yamaha too. But he had become more comfortable and confident on the KTM every time he rode it, and the results were starting to reflect that. The bigger question was where we want Evan to go. The aim has always been to keep moving him into classes that challenge and develop him, so moving on from the R6 was only ever a question of when rather than if. The KTM brought the when forward. It also had the potential to be a lot cheaper to run than a highly tuned R6.
So on Saturday 29 August, Tom and I went to DMC Birmingham. DMC have partnered with Tom for some time, so it was a chance for me to meet them, pick up some spares for Tom’s KTM, including replacement crash protection, and ask about getting hold of another 990 RC R.
The answer was a waiting list.
Sammi went looking instead, through eBay, Facebook and anywhere else a 990 RC R might turn up. She found two. One was at a KTM dealer in Wales, who turned out to be taking orders rather than actually having a bike. The other was in Belfast, advertised with 130 miles on it.
I rang the seller, Neil. He’s an experienced road racer who had bought the KTM to go road racing, only to find that, as a new model, it hadn’t been homologated for the racing he wanted to do. So it was for sale.
Buying a bike on the other side of the Irish Sea without seeing it does make you think about scams, and I was cautious. Neil couldn’t have done more to put my mind at rest. He sent me his Facebook profile and more photos of the bike in his garage, answered all my questions, and turned down my offer of a holding deposit. He’d also bought a spare screen and crash protectors, which came with the bike, and he knocked £500 off the price towards our travel costs.
The price was already very reasonable, the bike was effectively new and we didn’t have to join a waiting list. It was a no brainer. Within a couple of hours we’d decided to buy it. The same day we’d been told about the waiting list, we had another 990 RC R lined up.
Tom left home at about quarter past three on Sunday morning and picked me up at four. We took his smaller van rather than the race truck, which was cheaper on both fuel and the ferry, and about five and a half hours later we were at Cairnryan for the 11:15 sailing to Belfast.
Neil lives about half an hour from Belfast docks. With our ferry getting in at 13:30 and the same boat heading back at 15:30, there wasn’t time to get to his house, load the bike and still make check-in, so he brought the KTM to the main car park at the docks. We looked it over, went through the paperwork and did the deal there. It was exactly as he’d described it: practically showroom condition, with the only real wear on the Michelin tyres, and those weren’t going to be used for our racing anyway.
The bike went into the van, we went straight to check-in and came home on the same ferry we’d gone out on. We were both excited and, if I’m honest, relieved. The day before, we’d been standing in DMC being told about a waiting list.
We were back in Cairnryan at 17:52 and drove more or less straight home, stopping for fuel and once to replace a rear light bulb on Tom’s van. We got to ours at about half past eleven, unloaded the KTM into the garage, and Tom finally set off home at around midnight.
The new bike went in next to Tom’s #73, the KTM Evan had been racing. We’d brought it back from Knockhill to get it ready for the next round, oil, brakes and all the usual jobs. Now there were two 990 RC Rs to prepare.
It also changed who rode what. With a KTM of our own, it didn’t make sense for Evan to keep putting miles on Tom’s bike, and it wouldn’t have been fair to Tom. Evan would move onto the new bike for both sprints and endurance, and Tom would ride his own 990 in the remaining endurance rounds alongside his Streetbike programme on his KTM 890.
Tom’s bike had picked up a few scars while Evan had been riding it, including a couple of crashes, so it only seemed fair that some of the damaged parts moved across to Evan’s bike rather than staying with Tom. That included the belly pan and the exhaust, which was scratched and had developed a hole at Knockhill.
Then the fairings came off both bikes. Tom’s old livery came off his, the standard KTM decals came off ours, and I took both sets to SNS, who help us with bodywork and paint. They came back black, which left the question of what should go on them.
That was a bigger conversation than it sounds. Over the season our relationship with Tom and Sammi had grown into a lot more than borrowing a bike. They’d taken a real interest in Evan and shown real belief in what he could do, and they’d approached Caz and me about working more closely together in 2027. The details were still being worked out, but the intention to work together was settled. Tom was also becoming a proper teammate and mentor for Evan, and what I value most is that he genuinely wants Evan to progress, even if that means one day being faster than him.
So the new look needed to bring both teams together. We went through a lot of ideas, mixing Zero To One Racing and Ride Culture Racing colours and the partners behind both, until we had a brief that Ian at Eat My Dirt could work with. Tom already knew Ian, who had done the graphics on his 990 and his 890 Duke. Ian put the finishing touches to it and produced a set of graphics for each bike, the same livery on both with only the race numbers to tell them apart. Matching bodywork has a practical side too, because spare fairings can be shared between the two bikes.
The graphics arrived around the Wednesday or Thursday, and on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September Tom and Sammi came over to ours. Tom and Caz put the graphics on, Caz mostly on Evan’s #24 and Tom mostly on his #73, helping each other as they went, while I got on with preparing both bikes for racing, lockwiring and changing wheels and tyres.
By Saturday evening #24 and #73 were sitting side by side in the same colours.
Three weeks earlier, at Knockhill, Evan had been racing a KTM we’d borrowed. Now there were two of them in our garage in matching colours, one of them ours, and we were due to leave for the next round at Anglesey on Thursday 17 September.
I’d like to say I stood back and took it all in, but I didn’t really get the chance. The whole thing had been a whirlwind, and there was still plenty to do before Thursday.
None of it happens without the people around us. DMC Birmingham, Sammi, Neil, SNS, Ian at Eat My Dirt, Caz and Tom all played their part in getting these two bikes to this point, but so have all of the partners who continue to support Zero To One Racing and what we’re trying to achieve. We’re incredibly grateful to every one of them for helping us turn what started as a dream into something that’s becoming very real.