Easy rider: “It’s satisfaction…you fix it and give it a life again.”
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Marco Möller is the founder of Möto Rauch & Staub, a popular hangout for Dubai’s bikers, craftsmen, and artists.
An electromechanical engineer by trade, Marco grew up in Germany, working with his hands.
“My old man used to refurbish everything at home. We did not have much money so we would repair stuff,” he says.
18 years ago, a friend of Marco invited him to Dubai to build a kitchen, which later led to a job as a technical director for a German firm building kitchens in the city.
“I enjoyed my job. I got to travel and see many countries, but I did not work with my hands anymore.”
New beginning
Everything changed after Marco broke his back in an accident. Having become physically and mentally down, he got his hands on an old motorcycle that he decided to restore.
Marco says: “It’s satisfaction. You have something that is not working anymore, you fix it and give it a life again.”
Marco says the process in turn brought him back to life. “I decided that I want to do this (working with bikes) everyday.”
Marco quit his job to join a friend who had a warehouse - there they started fixing and building motorbikes. After initially struggling, and on the advice of friends and clients, they built a kitchen and expanded the place.
“We built the place by our own hands; it took me about 3 years to build the place as it is now.”
Möto Rauch & Staub) is now Dubai’s only venue combining a workshop, a restaurant, and a barbershop. In addition, it hosts regular music gigs, through the Bull Funk Jamz, and showcases art, something that feeds into Marco’s plan to make it a venue which gives back to the community that once helped him.
“The motorcycle has brought me to people and now those people come to my shop, and I love being here.”
‘Dennis Hopper Widescreen’ Immersive Experience Exhibit To Tour Eight Cities
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EXCLUSIVE: The Hopper Art Trust has signed a partnership with the Louder Than Pop arts and entertainment company to create “Dennis Hopper: Widescreen,” a digital immersive experience that will tour eight cities next year, starting in Los Angeles.
The exhibit plans stops in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, London, and Paris, with a possibility to expand to other cities.
The Hopper experience will allow visitors to discover Hopper’s multifaceted career as an actor, director, photographer, and artist. The 30,000-square-foot space will include experiential designs, full-scale physical sets, 3D projection mapping, sound and lighting, an Ambi-Sonic guided headphone tour with soundtrack and video, and still footage.
The exhibit will highlight Hopper’s work as an actor and filmmaker, including some of his most iconic films, including Rebel Without a Cause, Easy Rider. Apocalypse Now, The Last Movie, and Blue Velvet.
Louder Than Pop, LLC is an arts and entertainment company based in Los Angeles that partners with established IP/legacy icons with cross generational appeal to create multidimensional traveling pop-up immersive experiences in major cities.
Visitors will experience the Hopper collection with Hopper as guide, offering his own words and insights, curated from written and recorded interviews.
The exhibit includes a collection of Hopper’s never-before-seen personal items discovered at his Taos, New Mexico properties, the El Cortez Theater, and items that are part of the Hopper Art Trust. All showcase a broad range of Hopper’s artistic work and personal items.
These include hundreds of writings, artwork, photographs, awards, film props, wardrobe, and unreleased film reels. It will also include private letters to Dennis Hopper from artists including John Lennon, Miles Davis, and Peter Fonda.
In addition to acting, Hopper was also a world-renowned photographer whose most notable works include the cover photo for Ike and Tina Turner’s River Deep – Mountain High and the 1965 civil rights march in Selma, Alabama.
As an artist, Hopper’s paintings, collage works, and photography were shown in galleries and museums throughout the world including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Walker Art Center, the Whitney, and Cinematheque Francaise. He was also a sought-after writer. Vogue and other publications recognized him a hip young influencer and hired him to write articles about the new generation, the art scene, Hollywood and other topics.
“I’ve always had a lifelong obsession with Dennis Hopper and his iconic work as an actor, director, photographer and artist,” said Pierre Vudrag, CEO of Louder Than Pop. “It has been a four-year journey, including working through setbacks during the pandemic, to partner with the Dennis Hopper Trust and Hopper’s inner circle of colleagues and friends to make this vision come to fruition. It is an honor to be able to delve into the multifaceted talent of Dennis Hopper and share this experience with the public.”
“We could not be more elated to partner with Louder Than Pop to bring the iconic career of visionary Dennis Hopper to life for his fans and the next generation of filmmakers, artists and writers. We look forward to the opportunity to experience the full scope of his work in a way that has yet been seen thanks to the advances in immersive technology,” said Marin Hopper, the Hopper Art Trust.
Tickets will be available soon at LouderThanPop.com
Why satellite riders can’t be champion (except maybe this one)
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There was a time not too long ago when it genuinely looked possible to win a MotoGP world championship on satellite machinery, as riders like Sete Gibernau and Marco Melandri came close to the number one spot from outside the works ranks at Honda.
That’s changed in recent years as new factories joined the grid and the performance gaps between those factories closed.
But is there one name lining up to start the 2022 season who might be able to buck the trend and become champion on a satellite bike?
It’s a feat that hasn’t been achieved since 2001, and even then, when Valentino Rossi took his Nastro Azzurro-branded Honda NSR500 to the last title of the two-stroke era, it was technically as a part of a satellite team but in reality was simply a full-factory HRC effort running in different colours from its neighbours next door in the Repsol garage.
Since then, others, like Gibernau and Melandri, have come close, finishing second in the championship to Rossi in 2003, 2004 and 2005 for Fausto Gresini’s satellite team.
More recently, Franco Morbidelli repeated the feat for Petronas SRT Yamaha in 2020, running Joan Mir to within 13 points on an old-spec bike but in the end not managing to snatch the title away from the factory Suzuki. And there was a degree to which Morbidelli’s run was anomalous in an odd COVID-shortened season of restricted development and troubled factory teams.
So why have things changed so much in a relatively short period of time? Well, quite simply, MotoGP has become insanely close, ever since the huge rule change that came along in 2016.
Every Gresini Honda MotoGP rider ranked Read more
Moving to Michelin tyres and specifying control electronics rather than the more and more complicated custom software systems of before negated the advantage held by the legacy manufacturers and closed the gap to the backmarker factories.
That means not only are Ducati and Suzuki now back on par with Yamaha and Honda, but KTM and Aprilia have also closed the gap. All bar Aprilia have won in the last two years.
Of course, there are plenty of factory bikes that aren’t in factory teams. There’s been a rapid expansion in manufacturers supporting their satellites since the rule change, with Ducati leading the way in handing over the most recent spec of machine first to Pramac Racing and Danilo Petrucci in the late 2010s. In 2022, three of the six independent-class Desmosedici bikes on the grid will be factory machines.
There’s more to winning titles than just the machinery you’re on, though. Don’t get me wrong; factory bikes in satellite teams are absolutely capable of winning races, something demonstrated by Morbidelli, Fabio Quartararo, Miguel Oliveira and Jorge Martin in the past two years.
But there’s more to titles than race wins and podiums; just look at the results of Johann Zarco last year, with the Pramac rider being heralded as a title contender in the early stages of the season only to see his campaign fall away.
Will Martin’s rise halt Zarco’s Ducati dream? Read more
A part of that is very easy to explain. Yes, he might have started the year on the very latest specification of bike, but when upgrades arrive, they obviously arrive to the factory first – especially as Pecco Bagnaia started to stretch his legs as a title contender.
Another example is what happened at KTM, where all bikes struggled initially until a new frame arrived to the factory box and gave them an instant performance boost; one that satellite team Tech3 took a while to catch up with as new chassis components were constructed.
Then there’s the issue of resources. You might only see a crew chief and a data engineer sitting next to the rider in their box during practice – and in satellite teams, that’s normally all that they’ve got in their corner, perhaps apart from one engineer from the factory perhaps shared between two riders.
But in the factory squads, there’s a whole other truck of data experts and number crunchers who you never see, working away behind the scenes all weekend. It’s in their computers and strategy meetings that the details that give the final few hundredths of a second are calculated, from fuel consumption to tyre life.
Take this as an example; when the COVID pandemic restricted how many people were allowed into the paddock, each satellite team was allowed 25 staff, but for factories that number was 45 – yet you didn’t see many more faces in the garage. That’s a lot of extra salaries, flights, hotels – and brains.
That money doesn’t just apply to resources, either; it applies to riders too. Simply put, factories have more money to spend, and the best talent goes after the money. 2021 champion Quartararo was a title contender for much of the previous season, but it was the jump to the factory Yamaha team that gave him the added boost he needed for championship honours – along with a tenfold pay rise.
The conclusion you could easily reach from that is that it’s all but impossible for the minnow satellite teams to take on the factory sharks.
But occasionally, there is a rare exception that proves the rule – and in 2022 there’s a possibility that not Zarco but 2021 race winner Martin can be that rider.
Martin’s MotoGP win was a masterplan forged in adversity Read more
Firstly, he has the most important factor in spades; talent. You can always identify future champions not necessarily by their race results but by qualifying performances, and it hasn’t gone amiss that Martin started only his second MotoGP race from pole position, before going on to finish on the podium.
He went even better later in the year by taking not just a victory but doing it after bouncing back from severe injuries suffered at only round three, breaking eight bones at Portimao and disrupting his whole year. Had he not had that crash, then it’s easy to argue that he’d have won more than a single race – a very impressive rookie season.
And here’s the thing; Ducati is perhaps the most egalitarian manufacturer on the grid. If one of its riders starts to look increasingly successful, it’ll back them, even at the risk of annoying its factory stars.
Of course, with Martin widely tipped to replace Jack Miller in the factory team for 2023, putting more resources Martin and Pramac’s way might be a decision that’s even easier to make if the call is made relatively early in the season to demote the Australian next year.
It’s not quite the perfect storm of factors that Martin needs to be a title contender, of course – but it’s fair to say that he starts 2022 with a much greater pre-season chance than any other satellite rider has been given for a very long time.
Should he deliver, it’ll be an exceptional result – but if he doesn’t, then there’s every possibility that he’ll still tick that title winner box as a factory rider shortly afterwards.
2022 Kawasaki KX450 Review
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2022 Kawasaki KX450 Review
The best 450 motocross bike for four years running.
Delaware native returns for dual restaurant venture
DELAWARE, Ohio — Delaware Hayes High School Graduate TD Rider had spent the past five years in Florida selling cars, deep-sea fishing and dabbling in southern recipes.
In the last year, he discovered an opportunity to return home and start his own business when two buildings opened up in downtown Delaware.
What You Need To Know Rider is the owner of Kelly’s Island Kitchen, named after his mother, and the conjoined restaurant Queso Fuego
Rider said the town has really changed over the last few years and is proud to be a part of its growth
While Kelly’s Island Kitchen offers various southern-inspired fish and seafood, Queso Fuego features Tex-Mex dishes
“I knew I could do it. I definitely had some people who said, ‘you’ll never do this,’ or ‘you couldn’t do this.’ Every day it makes me smile knowing that we did it,” said new Delaware business owner TD Rider.
But the journey getting to this point wasn’t easy. Sadly for the Rider family, things took an unexpected turn last May when his mother Kelly, a long-time Delaware teacher, lost her 14-year battle with brain cancer.
“She actually came down to visit me and three weeks later when she was back, she was gone. As I was starting to learn about these restaurants that were available. Immediately, it wasn’t even a blink that I knew that’s what I wanted to name it. Reminds us of all the cool adventures we’ve been on,” said Rider.
While Kelly’s Island Kitchen offers various southern-inspired fish and seafood, Rider’s conjoined restaurant Queso Fuego features Tex-Mex dishes.
Rider said he’s proud to be part of downtown Delaware’s growth as a foodie destination.
“It’s getting a lot of attention from local magazines as well too, and a lot of online traction as well too. So people are starting to, instead of going away from Delaware, people are starting to come to Delaware,” said Rider.
Rider said that’s a big change from when he left town just five years ago.
He said the reception from the local community has been overwhelming, and deep down, he knows his mom is looking down from above with a smile.
“The first night we were open on the other side, they knew it was going to be a really big hit. She’s watching over us and cheering us on the whole way,” said Rider.