Col’s SLUKback to the Noughties: Part 1 – 2000-2004 | FEATURE

It’s flashback time again SLUKers. Following on from the previous 80s and 90s articles, we are getting slightly more up to date with a look back at the decade from 2000 through to 2009, labelled ‘the Noughties’.

At the start of the new century, scooter rallies had started to see an upsurge in attendance once again. In fact, the scene was positively booming and this decade would shape things for a long time to come as new fast automatic scooters began to arrive in droves.

I’ve picked out around 160 images (photos and rally patches) and so will make this particular lookback a two-part article, from 2000–2004 and then followed by 2005 -2009. I’ve got loads of good memories of my travels in that decade, hopefully some of you might share some of yours too?

Words and photos: Col

Millenium

The start of the new millennium in the year 2000 (may not be factually correct, but hey ho) saw big changes in the world of scooters. The explosion of automatic scooters on the scene was plain to see and an annoyance to some!

The sheer number of rallies and events being put on each year dwarfed the number of events we’d had in the two previous decades. Regionalised scooter alliance rallies, and large scale club rallies outnumbered the amount of National Rallies massively. It was also the decade that saw part of the rally calendar starting to get a bit repetitive.

Here are a couple of my memories from each of the years…

2000, saw the strange occurrence of Easter and then May Day on consecutive weekends. I remember setting off to the Ayr National Rally just two days after I’d returned home from the Great Yarmouth rally – 10 days away from home scootering in a 12-day period isn’t bad by anyone’s standards!

The Isle of Wight rally had a near-disastrous fire in the Ice Arena nighttime do. Thankfully, everyone was evacuated and uninjured and the event still went ahead after the fire brigade deemed it safe. DJ Eddie Wainwright restarted the do with ‘Disco Inferno’!

Woolacombe hosted its first National rally in that year.

2001: A brand new Vespa PX 200 Disc cost £2000 here in the UK. For the first time in a long time we had two new National Rally venues back to back. They were Witton Castle and then Tenby. The very popular Run to the Shires rally at Weston on Trent made its first appearance in that year, as did the end of season rally to the Cala Gran holiday camp in Blackpool.

2002 saw the VCB celebrate its 50th anniversary.

Both the pre-season and end of season rallies were held in Blackpool – albeit at different venues. A once-only visit to the Scottish town of Hawick will go down as one of the poorest attended Nationals ever, due to the unfortunate very late booking and advertising of the event.

2003 brought in the launch of the new Vespa GT 200 4-stroke, which coincided with the end of production of the Vespa PX 200. A popular National Rally to the Isle of Man (in conjunction with the LCGB) was followed by a lively trip back to the North Wales town of Rhyl, not visited since the 1980s.

2004: a pre-season rally to Scarborough was the first time the official rally calendar opener had been on the North East coast – all previous pre-season rallies had been on the North West coast. For the second year in a row, Skegness and Kelso shared National Rally status on the same end of May Bank Holiday weekend. And, 13 years since the last visit, the legendary Exmouth National was back on the calendar.