BETA PRESS TRIALS CHALLENGE / TRY TRIALS TOUR
BY: CHAD DE ALVA
When most riders think of trials riding, their mind usually jumps to the last video they saw of a legendary trials rider sending a line that seems to defy the laws of physics. What these top shelf riders can do on a trials bike is most impressive, but trials riding is so much more than what you see when you’re scrolling the internet. In fact, trials riding is very fun, challenging, and a phenomenal cross training tool for any other discipline of riding at any skill level. Spending time on a trials bike will help your balance, body positioning, cornering, clutch control, throttle control, and brake control to name a few benefits. Whether you’re looking to get better at turning your liter plus ADV bike around in tight places, or you want to work on upping your obstacle game, a trials bike is a great way to practice. Beta USA CEO Tim Pilg is well aware of how awesome trials is, which is why Beta USA recently held their third Press Trials Challenge (PTC) as part of Beta’s Try Trials Tour.
The Beta Motorcycles Press Trials Challenge is for moto-industry media to get to experience the sport of trials in a one day event that’s equal parts trials bike test ride, trials competition, and day spent riding with a crew of good people. The format for the PTC is simple: The morning was spent learning to ride Beta’s new 2024 Evo Factory trials bikes, and Beta USA Trials Team Pro riders Alex Niederer and Cole Cullins were on hand to show us the way and pull off all of the Hollywood lines for our cameras. After spending the morning trying to find our balance, we had a two-man team trials competition with five sections that we rode two times each. To make things more interesting, Beta asked journalists to pair up with pro riders to form a team. I got to pair up with AMA Hall of Famer, multi-time national champion, and ISDE medalist Rodney Smith.
A wet and rainy MotoVentures in Cahuilla, California was our playground for the PTC. With an endless supply of granite boulders of all shapes and sizes, MotoVentures is one of those places you drive by on the highway and say “look at all of those trials rocks!” All of the moisture made for an interesting traction modifier – normally granite boulders provide all of the grip, but when things get wet and muddy it’s a whole different game – unless you’re a pro rider like Alex and Cole, who had no problem teleporting their bikes to the tops of the largest boulders around while we all got to know the 2024 Beta Evo Factory 200s.
In case you’re wondering why Beta didn’t turn us loose on a bunch of 300cc trials bikes, the short answer is that we aren’t good enough riders to need 300s. Trials places a huge emphasis on cornering and bike control, and the larger-displacement bikes make so much torque that it’s really easy to ham-fist your inputs and wash the front end out. In other words, a 300 is too much bike until you’re riding the upper divisions of trials. The Evo Factory 200cc on the other hand delivers a smooth power output, so navigating the impossibly tight looking corners found in lower level trials sections is possible without pushing your front end all over the place. The 200 still has plenty of grunt to get you up obstacles, so don’t think for a second that it isn’t enough bike – it’s honestly a perfect starting place for the vast majority of off-road riders.
After what felt like minutes from first getting on our bikes, but was really the entire morning, the Beta guys were calling us back to the paddock to explain the format for the afternoon’s competition. Beta had set five sections for us to ride, and each team member would ride each section twice.
A section is a course that defines where a rider has to go through the use of ribbon and gates. Ribbon works the way it always does – you can’t cross it. Gates are primarily used to set the difficulty of a section. For example, a novice line may have a gate that has you make a turn around an obstacle in the section, but the clubman (harder) gate would send you over the obstacle. In an effort to help make trials translate to the many MX riders in attendance, Beta simply created an A line and a B line in each section.
Scoring in trials is just like in Happy Gilmore – I mean golf: The rider (team in this case) with the lowest score wins. Every time you put a foot down to dab in a section, you get a point. After dabbing three times in a section, you can dab as much as you want through the rest of the section without getting any more points. Crossing the ribbon, missing a gate, crossing your track, crashing, or stalling your bike gets you five points. If you ride a section without dabbing or doing anything else wrong, you get what’s called a clean, or a zero-point score.
Beta did a great job setting sections for the PTC that were both fun and challenging while serving as a great sampling of what sections in a real competition are like. The first two sections were fairly easy to clean with a bit of bike control and cornering technique. Section three upped the ante a bit, with some turns that required more precise line selection and a few mandatory obstacles that would stop you if you didn’t commit. Section four and five are where riders really started to accumulate points: Section four finished with a series of S-turns that could only be done with near-perfect line choice and technique, and quite a few riders ended up scoring a five when they rode over the ribbon in the S turns. A couple of climbs up granite slabs that fed into tight boulder weaving U-turns and mud slickened rocks on section five also led to quite a few dabs. That’s the beauty of trials – in just a few hundred square feet of space you can ride a section that will completely humble you in multiple ways.
All too soon, our competition was over and it was time to give our bikes back. Beta did a great job cooking up an event for a diverse crew of moto journalists and judging from the smiles and overall stoke in the paddock at the end of the day, it was evident that trying trials had proven to be fun for all.
As someone who has been riding trials for a couple of years, I’m completely sold on the sport for its own merits, and for the improvements trials has made in my off-road and adventure bike riding. Trials competitions offer a nearly limitless amount of challenge and fun – There’s the ever-present drive to clean the next section, and just when cleaning sections in your class is starting to get easy, there is another class to move up to, and a whole new crew of riders to compete against. Yet my favorite part of trials isn’t competing – it’s free riding with my buddies.
With just a little bit of space and a riding buddy or two, trials bikes can provide endless fun and training. All you have to do is ride around and look for obstacles you want to hit – and in the right country, opportunities are everywhere. Any sort of object can be used to make gates, or you can simply play follow the leader. What makes trials such a phenomenal cross training tool is that you’ll end up sessioning everything you ride multiple times, which provides much more practice than making one attempt at an obstacle while riding single track or having to make that one tight U turn on an adventure ride. Trials riding is essentially non-stop practice for other disciplines of riding, so just by dinking around on a trials bike you’re becoming a better off-road or adventure rider.
Beta’s Try Trials Tour is a great opportunity to sample the fun, challenge, and training opportunity that is trials riding. It takes seconds after first hopping on a trails bike to appreciate the potential, and in no time at all, most riders will be looking at the world differently sizing up obstacles and contemplating if they can thread a line though a given patch of ground. They say trials is the best kept secret in motorcycling, so now that you know, you owe it to yourself to give it a try.
