HAS any craze ever swept the bike industry quite as fast and as completely as the current trend for scramblers? It’s hard to think of one.
At the recent EICMA show in Milan it seemed that every other unveiling was another knobbly-tyred, retro-styled machine harking back to a past that never really looked quite like that. And now even Ural is in on the action.
The firm has fitted knobblies to its anachronistic Ranger sidecar outfit, renaming it ‘Scrambler’ (hard to believe nobody has trademarked that one yet) and painted it in waspish grey-and-yellow paint scheme. There are modest plans to sell 20 of them in 2015/2016.
Since it’s based on the Ranger, it’s two wheel drive (the sidecar wheel is driven as well as the bike’s rear wheel) so it’s probably got more off-road chops than a lot of the other recent ‘scrambler’ launches, and the hefty tubular steel nudge bars around the side car mean it can probably stand up to some beating, even if the weight of them isn’t likely to help performance much.
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