Founder and creative direction
Concept, route, operations, brand platform
2012 · 14 editions
Atlas mountains to the Sahara
In 2011 I finished my first build — a BMW R100 turned scrambler. A bike is a theory until something proves it, so I took it to the hardest place I could think of: the Atlas at nearly 2,000 metres, and then the dunes of the Sahara.
The ride was better than the bike deserved. The following year I ran it again and opened it to other riders. That was the first Scram Africa.
Take the wrong bike to the right place.
Nobody was doing this. Road bikes with a couple of off-road modifications have no business on sand rivers and endless rock tracks — which is exactly the point. The difficulty isn't a side effect of the route, it's the product. Riders come back having done something on a machine that shouldn't have made it, and that's an experience an adventure bike can't sell them.
Tracks, rock, sand, mud and tarmac across Morocco, over ten days. The hardest stages finish at the bivouac after dark. There are sandstorms. Bikes break, and occasionally bones do too.
Which is why the organisation carries its own mechanics and a doctor, and moves with the group. Taking unsuitable bikes into that terrain is only a good idea if everything around them is serious. That balance — a ride that stays genuinely hard, with an operation that can handle it — is the whole craft of the event.
Magazines and blogs around the world have covered it edition after edition, and riders keep coming from everywhere to do it. Fourteen editions on, it's still running.
For Fuel it did more than build an audience. It became the place where the work got tested: bikes customised specifically for clients riding the route, gear tested in the conditions it was designed for, and collections shot where they actually belong. An event that gave the brand something no campaign can — proof.
editions
days per edition
from the Atlas down to the dunes
This kind of work starts with a thirty-minute call and a fixed scope.