1908
The Board Track Era
Stripped racing bicycles fitted with one-cylinder engines, ridden on banked wooden tracks at terrifying speeds. The first dedicated motorcycle silhouette.
Home/Heritage
A century of speed.
One bike.
Every Michael Blast carries the bloodline of a hundred years of motorcycle culture — the board-track racers of 1908, the Triumph-engined cafés of 1955, the British Rockers, the Japanese customisers, and the riders who never stopped wanting bikes to look like this.
A short manifesto
Bikes used to look like something. Then they stopped. We started Michael Blast because we wanted to ride machines that remembered.
From the showroom floor
Chapter I · The Bloodline Begins
~ 1908 – 1928 ~Built for wooden ovals.
Before motorcycle racing found paved circuits and manicured tracks, it lived on wooden boards — steep, rough, and dangerous in a way that seems almost incomprehensible today. The board tracks were built from two-by-four planks nailed together in banking curves, sometimes as steep as sixty degrees. The machines that raced on them had no brakes. They barely had suspension. They had engines, frames, and riders willing to push both to the limit.
This was board track racing, and it was the first great chapter of American motorcycle culture. At its peak in the 1910s and 1920s, it drew crowds of tens of thousands to venues across the country. Riders became celebrities. Engineers became legends. The speed-to-spectacle ratio has never been surpassed.
The silhouette of a board tracker is unmistakable. Long and low, the tank sweeping back in a teardrop arc from headstock to seat.
By the late 1920s, the era was ending. Insurance costs were climbing. Riders were dying. Road racing was emerging as a safer alternative. The wooden ovals were torn down, the machines retired to barns and garages. But the design DNA of the board tracker didn’t disappear — it spread. You can trace a direct line from those stripped racers through every café racer, every custom chopper, and every retro electric bicycle that came after.
60°
Banking angle, max
100 mph
On a 1912 single
No brakes
By design
Archive · 1914
Indian Single · Wooden Oval
An Indian single at a Brooklyn motordrome, c.1914. Note the absence of brakes and the rider’s near-horizontal stance.
The long line
A hundred years, at a glance.
Six chapters of motorcycle culture, drawn end-to-end. Drag the rail or click an arrow to scroll through.
1938
The Ace Café Opens
A truck stop on London's North Circular Road becomes, by accident, the unofficial home of British motorcycle culture for the next twenty years.
1955
The Triton
Triumph engine, Norton frame. Built in British garages by men with day jobs. The bike that defined the café racer form factor.
1959
The Ton-Up Boys
Rocker culture peaks. The term “café racer” enters the British press. The aesthetic — low bars, swept tank, leather everywhere — locks in for sixty years.
1973
The Z1
Kawasaki releases the 900cc Z1. Japanese manufacturers begin building bikes that look like café racers from the factory. The form goes mainstream.
2008
The Custom Revival
Wrenchmonkees, Deus Ex Machina, and the BikeEXIF blog push café racer culture back to the front of the design conversation. The category becomes global.
2016
Michael Blast Begins
A Calgary studio. A designer, a sketchbook, and a borrowed garage. The first electric café racer prototype rolls out the door — the start of a brand that's about the ride, not the headtube badge.
2026 ·
The Greaser, Now
Four bikes in the lineup. 10,000+ bikes shipped. Every Michael Blast comes through our Calgary showroom — test-ridden, dialled in, and shipped from there. The bloodline continues — same DNA, different drivetrain.
Drag, or use arrows →
Triumph 650 · c.1965
The Form, In Black
A Triumph 650 café racer build — clip-ons, teardrop tank, swept exhaust. The silhouette that defined the next sixty years.
The Rockers · c.1962
The 100-mile-an-hour club
The Ton-Up Boys — credited with the term “café racer” — racing between coffee houses on modified British twins.
Chapter II · The Form Takes Shape
~ 1938 – 1965 ~A bike built for the next stretch.
In post-war London, a generation of young men gathered at roadside cafés — the Ace, the Busy Bee, the Salt Box — and built motorcycles for one purpose: cover the distance between cafés before a song finished on the jukebox.
They were called the Ton-Up Boys, because they aimed for the ton — 100 miles per hour. The bikes they built had a look. Low. Long. Stripped. No fenders, no windscreen, no chrome except where chrome belonged. Café racers weren’t a style — they were a category of speed, defined by what got removed, not what got added.
A café racer is what’s left after you take everything off a motorcycle that isn’t trying to make it faster.
By the time Marlon Brando wore a Schott Perfecto and a sneer in The Wild One, the silhouette had crossed the Atlantic. The form would be revived three times in the next sixty years — once by the Japanese in the 1970s, once by builders like Steve Carpenter in the late 2000s, and once again by us, in 2017, with an aircraft-aluminum frame, a Bafang motor, and a hand-stitched leather seat.
1938
Ace Café opens
100 mph
The ton
Triton
The defining build
Chapter III · The Road Runs Out
~ 1962 – 1980 ~Where the pavement ends.
The scrambler grew up beside the café racer — but where the café racer chased speed on tarmac, the scrambler chased it where the road stopped. American desert racing, British trials, the Italian off-road scenes of the 1960s — all converged on a single silhouette: taller saddle, knobbier tires, raised exhausts, the engine pulled high to clear the rocks.
The original scramblers were stripped-down street bikes with the bare minimum done to survive the dirt. No-one was selling them from a factory — you built one out of what you could afford. By the time the factories caught up, the form was already iconic.
A scrambler is what happens when a café racer decides the road is just a suggestion.
The Outsider — our scrambler — inherits the same vocabulary. The taller bottom bracket, the fat tires, the raised battery pack standing in for a raised exhaust. The geometry is wrong for café racing on purpose: built for the gravel, the broken pavement, and whatever you can find past the city limits.
1962
Triumph TR6C
4.0″
Tires on our Outsider
Off-piste
By design
Outsider 5.0 · 2026
Same form. New decade.
The Outsider 5.0 carries the scrambler bloodline directly — raised silhouette, fat tires, exposed mechanicals.
From the archives
The machines that started it all.
A small collection from a hundred years of motorcycle photography. Hover or tap any image to see it in full colour.
Then & now
A century apart. The same spirit.
An Indian Single from 1914 and a Greaser Classic from 2026. Different drivetrains. Same silhouette. Same intent.
— 1914 —
Indian Board Tracker
- Engine61 ci · single, IOE
- DriveBelt direct, no clutch
- BrakesNone
- FrameSteel · single downtube
- Top speed~100 mph
- SaddleLeather over springs
— 2026 —
Michael Blast Greaser
- MotorBafang 500W Rear Hub
- DriveShimano 7-speed Altus
- BrakesHydraulic Star Union
- FrameAluminum Tig Welded
- Top speed32 km/h (20 mph)
- Saddle—
Chapter IV · The Calgary Showroom
Where every Michael Blast meets its rider.
Every Michael Blast bike comes through our Calgary showroom before it goes home. Not a factory — a flagship retail floor with the full lineup, accessories, parts, and a service bay open Tuesday through Saturday. You can sit on a Greaser, ride an Outsider, run an Outsider 5.0 around the block, and see the leather and brass in person before you buy.
When a rider wants something specific — a swept bar instead of flat, a different saddle, a paint touch, an extended battery — our crew makes those revisions on the floor before the bike ships. After the bike is yours, the same crew handles service, warranty, and the occasional walk-in question. Come visit. We’re an easy place to find.
Michael BlastFounder & Head of DesignCalgary, AB · since 2016
Ready when you are.
Ride the century.
Four bikes in the lineup. Each one a direct descendant of a different chapter of motorcycle culture. Ride them at our Calgary showroom, then ship free across Canada and the US.