Riding around the clock to set a new 50 cc distance record

Which goes to show that if you drill down deep enough, or venture out to the fringes of what’s normal, it’s not hard to find a niche where you can be king of the hill.

“Out on the fringes” is sort of Greg Hatcher’s business slogan (actually it’s “big time small bore,” but bear with me here). Greg and his buddy Kevin Estep created MNNTHBX nearly a decade ago to meet the needs of the then-niche small-bike community. Even though custom Groms and Ruckus scooters are mainstream now, Greg still finds ways to push the envelope and keep things weird.  

“We’re always looking for weird ways to enjoy bikes,” says the guy who once put me on a 49 cc penny-farthing with a 52-inch front wheel, and had me steer while he manned the throttle on a KTM 640/Chinese dune buggy contraption he’d built. It was a terror to ride; very CTXP.

Greg’s latest “stupid idea" (his words, not mine, in case the quotation marks don’t make that clear) entailed tackling a 50 cc distance record. "Someone stumbled across the world record for miles ridden by a single rider on a 50 cc scooter," says Greg. "It was 558 miles or something, and we didn't have to do much math to figure out we could probably do better than that.”

Honda supplied a Ruckus and Greg leveraged the credibility of his massively successful Barber Small Bore festival to convince Barber Motorsports Park to let them use the 2.4-mile road course for the endeavor.

“The biggest hurdle was that me and the guys are old, we weren’t gonna ride the thing,” says Greg. “We just wanted to BBQ in the paddock and laugh at someone else doing it.” 

The solution was to enlist Kevin's son, Ethan. “He’s 20. He’s fit, he’s an Army cadet so he’s tough, and even though he’d never ridden a bike we knew he’d figure out the Ruckus,” says Greg. “Honestly, though, I think the biggest benefit was that he was naive. He was so excited to do it, and I was thinking ‘Yeah this is going to be fun for you for about an hour.’”

The ride kicked off at 6 p.m. on an August evening when, mercifully, a passing storm dropped the temperature from nearly 100 degrees to about 75. Ethan rolled out onto the track, somewhat wobbly during his first-ever scooter experience. He started slowly but the speed ramped up quickly. “Turns out a smoking lap time at Barber on a Ruckus is four minutes,” says Greg, “but I guess that’s a record of its own.” 

Ethan stayed out for a full four hours that first stint, draining the scooter’s 1.3-gallon tank and racking up an easy 120 miles. “He said his butt hurt when he came in, so we folded up a towel and put it on the seat, and then sent him off into the night,” says Greg. Then when Ethan came in for his second pit stop around 1 a.m., the team smelled burning rubber. “I thought we must have burned the belt and might be in trouble,” says Greg, “but it turns out the towel had just slipped and was melting the side of the tire.” 

Greg and the team didn’t put a lot of thought into the mileage until the halfway point at 6 a.m.. “At the rate Ethan was going, he was on track to do 800 miles, so we were all feeling good,” recalls Greg. But when Ethan rolled into the pits at 6:30, it was clear he wasn’t feeling good. “He came in weaving, his eyes were just looking through me. The kid was in a different dimension.”

With some decent headroom in terms of mileage, the team opted to take an extended timeout so Ethan could recover. A cold shower and some mouthfuls of leftovers from the shrimp boil the guys had the night before helped, and then when the sun came over the trees the light brought MNNTHBX’s fearless rider fully back to life. 

Ethan put in another solid four-hour stint, but by 11 a.m. the temperature had climbed into the 90s and fatigue was setting in again. “He dropped his shifts down to one hour, and then by 1 p.m. he was only doing five laps at time.” They were still 40 miles from the record, but the pace had slowed to a crawl and Greg knew he needed to motivate his rider.

“We were raising money for the Boys & Girls Club,” says Greg, “and everyone’s donations added up to about $5 a lap, so when I saw Ethan was really struggling I’d hit him up on the radio and tell him to go make another few bucks for the kids. He used to be a student at our local club so he’d rally and put in another lap.”

Ethan and the Ruckus surpassed the 18-year-old record at about 3 p.m., and then 12 miles later they had to pull the plug. “One of the nastiest storms I’ve ever seen rolled in, it was essentially an inland hurricane,” says Greg. “Ethen was riding in a seriously diminished mental capacity at that point, so we called it. That was a good moment for him.”

MNNTHBX’s record isn’t official since they didn’t pony up the $29,000 that the Guinness organization required to witness and certify the attempt, so their 586-mile run won’t appear alongside the world’s tallest cow or the fastest time to drink two liters of soda (18.45 seconds!). 

But, the team did raise about $1,400 for charity, and had a good time doing it. “We were just doing this for fun. We like to do stuff that’s a little risky and weird,” says Greg. “You can find a faster 50 cc bike and we left three hours on the table, so we know that record can be broken.”

The question is, who's crazy enough to do it?