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Sherco is a French and Spanish motorcycle manufacturer, specialising in off-road motorbikes. Sherco are best known for their extremely popular trials bikes, although they also make enduro and supermoto bikes.
The company was founded in 1998, and currently has two production facilities. A factory in Caldes de Montbui, Spain, some 30 km north of Barcelona is where the company's trials bikes are manufactured. Enduro and supermoto bikes are built at a factory in Nimes, France, close to Italy.
Supermoto (also called Supermotard due to its strong foothold in France) is a cross-over of motocross and road racing. Races are commonly held on road racing tracks with an off-road section in the infield; approximately 70% tarmac and 30% dirt. The motorcycles used are frequently custom-created combinations of off-road motorcycles and road-racing rims/tires. Riders also wear a combination of road race and offroad equipment, normally leathers and a motocross helmet and boots. Unlike normal motorcycle racing, the emphasis lies on slower (<100 mph / <161 km/h), short and twisty tracks, where skill matters far more than outright machine performance.
Supermoto has its origins in the 1970s where ABC’s Wide World of Sports was the highest-rated sports show in the United States. In 1979, ABC commissioned a made-for-TV event to be included in the series, named Superbikers, whose intention was to find the ultimate all-around motorcycle racer. Superbikers was then manifested as a yearly event run at southern California's Carlsbad Raceway. The show's tarmac-and-dirt courses were intended to draw on talent from the worlds of off-road, flat-track and road-racing. World and National Championship-winning motorcycling greats such as Kenny Roberts and Jeff Ward, whose respective sports at the time were road-racing and motocross, participated in the races. The Superbikers quickly became a huge Nielsen rating contender, running until 1985, at which point ABC was forced to cancel the show due to new management and cuts; its cancellation also initiated a long sabbatical of the sport in the USA. The European racers who participated in the sport at Carlsbad, however, brought it back to Europe with them, where it quickly gained popularity in countries such as France.
2003 signalled the resurrection of the sport in the United States with the birth of the AMA Supermoto championship. Wikipedia |
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