Local builder scoops first Cologne Custom Championship

15/10/2008 by info.

Christoph Madaus (Madaus Design, www.twintrax.de) from Cologne won top honors and 5,000 Euro expenses contribution towards competing at the 2009 Official World Championship of Custom Bike Builing (Sturgis, SD, August 2nd to 5th) at the latest official Affiliate event to be held.

The prestigious INTERMOT Expo draws up to 300,000 visitors, and is acknowledged worldwide as one of the most important motorcycle industry events on the global calendar. As a new feature, this year saw the show become affiliated to the OWC program for the first time with the launch of the Cologne Custom Champoionship, an invitational custom bike event designed to showcase the ‘best-of-the-best’ from the previous two years of the affiliate program and European Championships in Europe.

Called ‘TwinTrax’, Christoph’s bike first shot to attention when it won 2nd place in the Freestyle class and came 2nd Best in Show at the Bigtwin Bike Show in the Netherlands last year. Christoph followed that up with 15th place at the European Championship in Mainz, Germany, in March this year and, having won many admirers for both the design and engineering innovation and execution of his project, the bike will now make its US debut at Sturgis next year as a result of this win.

Featuring two S&S 1340cc 45 degree air-cooled v-twin engines mounted one behind the other, many have commented that not only has Christoph pulled off something that many would have thought impossible (the bike is a “runner” and was seen to be so by the AMD/OWC personnel present at the Big Twin Show last year), but that he has done so to a level of engineering and finish values that are of OE production bike standards.

Second place was taken by Tobias Guckel’s much admired ‘Seppster II’ (TGS Motorcycles, www.tgs-motorcycles.de), which pulled second place in this year’s European Championship and third place in this year’s World Championship.

Third place went to Andreas Bergerforth’s ‘Open Mind’ (Thunderbike, Germany, www.thunderbike.de) which pulled 5th in the World Championship and is the reigning European Championship winning build.

The results reinforced the validity of the plan to develop the Cologne Custom Championship as a biennial invitational for Europe’s top bikes as a celebration of excellence that exposes the engineering quality of the contemporary custom industry to many hundreds of thousands more riders than would normally be exposed to it, and we here at AMD would like to extend the thanks of all those involved in the custom motorcycle industry for their generous support in making such a showcase possible.

The next INTERMOT Expo and Cologne Custom Championship will be staged in the same venue on October 13-17, 2010.

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