Front End Chatter

Hello and welcome to Front End Chatter E146, the UK's most iambically pentametered motorcycling podcast, poetically performed and produced by Martin Fitz-Gibbons and Simon Hargreaves, and perennially supported by Bennetts, the bike insurance specialists, and www.bikesocial.co.uk, the happeningiest place to go for offers, deals and square meals – if you can buy it for your bike or your riding life,...

Hello and go away to Front End Chatter, the UK's most motorcycling podcast featuring aural nonsense from Martin Fitz-Gibbons and Simon Hargreaves. This is episode 145, supported and nourished by Bennetts Bike Social; so much more than just bike – and now car – insurance: check out their website to discover the multifarious munificent benefits of membership. And, if you're at all interested in Yama...

Hello and welcome to Front End Chatter Episode 144, Britain's – nay, the world's – most irreverent motorcycling podcast, with Martin Fitz-Gibbons and Simon Hargreaves. Thanks as ever to Bennetts, the bike insurance specialists, and BikeSocial.co.uk, the world of motorcycling on the web, for their unwavering support (especially while the new wing of Chatter Manors is built).   And on this week's ep...

Welcome, friends, to Front End Chatter E143 – the one hundred and forty third time Martin Fitz-Gibbons and Simon Hargreaves, some-time motorcycle journalists past and present, have sat, stood and otherwise presented themselves before a pair of microphones and spoken unto them, sometimes with funny accents.  And special thanks to our sponsors and friends at Bennetts, the bike insurance specialists,...

Hello and welcome to Front End Chatter E142, and right up front please accept sincere apologies for the lousy sound quality – the usual recording room at Chatter Manors has been flooded by an unfortunate incident involving a blockage in the sceptic tank and Ron, the missing handyman, who, it transpires, is in fact the blockage. Thus Simon and Martin have been forced to squeeze into the only room i...

Hello and welcome to E141 of that Front End Chatter they have nowadays, spoken with words by Martin Fitz-Gibbons and Simon Hargreaves and supported, enabled and legitimised by our fwends at Bennetts, the bike insurance specialists (and yes, they will insure a Tuono!), and Bike Social, the bike club that gives you access to discounts, track days, events and competitions – as well as running the mos...

Hello and welcome to Front End Chatter Episode 140 – in which Martin Fitz-Gibbons and Simon Hargreaves (supported and nurtured by Bennetts, the bike insurance specialists, and www.bikesocial.co.uk, the world of biking on the web) natter at length about: the Dutch TT at Assen and very much about the future of one Maverick Vinales – and where *is* his head at? BMW's new R1300GS and why it might not...

Hello and welcome to episode 139 of Front End Chatter, the marvellous motorcycling podcast supported and, indeed, buoyed by Bennetts, the bike insurance specialists, and www.bikesocial.co.uk, the world of motorcycling on the web. And on FEC this week we have: • young Fabio's habit of getting his boobs out, and the propriety of doing it on the last laps of a MotoGP race plans to livestream the 2022...

Hello and benvenuto to Front End Chatter, Britain's most tardy motorcycling podcast with Martin Fitz-Gibbons and Simon Hargreaves. And why not. And, lest we forget, grazie to our wonderfully benevolent benefactors Bennetts, the bike insurance specialists, from who you can secure not only, some say, the most competitive insurance premiums in the business, but who also are the only bike insurers who...

Hello and welcome to Front End Chatter Episode 137 in the long-running series of 137 so far, in which Simon H and Mufga, a pair of motorcycling outfluencers, talk about motorbikes and motorcycling – and are supported in their endeavour by the mighty Bennetts, the bike insurance specialists, and www.bikesocial.co.uk, the wonderful world of widing on the web. In this episode we have: MotoGP from Por...

Hello and welcome to Episode 136 of Front End Chatter, the UK's most chocolatey motorcycling podcast.  Thank you to Bennetts, the suspenders to our stockings, and www.bikesocial.co.uk, the internet's repository of all that is wise and current about motorcycling. A And in this episode Simon and Martin rattle on about:  • MotoGP is back! Two races from Qatar, a veritable oasis of human rights, and a...

Hello and welcome to Front End Chatter, the world's most self-deprecating motorcycling podcast in which, for the 135th time, Simon Hargreaves and Martin Fitz-Gibbons talk two wheels into a microphone. FEC is supported by Bennetts, Britain's best bike insurance specialists, and www.bikesocial.co.uk, the web's central repository of all the news, new bike reviews, product tests and touring info worth...

Hello and welcome to Episode 134 of Front End Chatter, the UK's most scatterbrained motorcycling podcast featuring the musical talents of Martin 'Maverick Not Vinales' Fitz-Gibbons and Simon 'Iceberg Lettuce' Hargreaves. Apparently it's the seventh anniversary of Front End Chatter. Happy birthday to us.   We are enabled and besotted with Bennetts, the Bike Insurance specialists – yes, ask them nic...

Hello and welcome to Front End Chatter, Britain's most pancake-powered biking podcast, with Simon Hargreaves and Martin Fitz-Gibbons, Britain's most pancaked motorcycle journalists. And Front End Chatter is, as ever, made from the plain flour and two eggs of Bennetts, the bike insurance specialists, and www.bikesocial.co.uk , the world's most comprehensive motorcycling website. And on this episode...

Hello and welcome to Front End Chatter, and episode 132 of the long funning ramily drama in which ranty old seadog Simon Hargreaves (played by Oliver Reed, in his final screen role), rattling around alone in the east wing of Chatter Manors, is faced with moral bankruptcy and can only be saved by the intervention of the saintly Martin Fitz-Gibbons (played by Peter O'Toole in his final screen role)....

Hello and welcome to Front End Chatter E131, Britain's favourite and longest serving motorcycling podcast, possibly either or, who's counting? What's for sure is we're indebted and abetted by Bennetts, the bike insurance specialists, and www.bikesocial.co.uk, the marvellous motorcycling website. And on FEC this week, Simon and Martin chatter about: Triumph's new Speed Triple 1200 RS – how big will...

Hello and welcome to Front End Chatter E130, and the first FEC of 2021; a brand new year, and hopefully things will get better – but some things stay the same and there's not much chance of FEC improving any time soon. Thanks as always to Bennetts, the bike insurance specialists, and www.bikesocial.co.uk, home of all that's good and virtuous in motorcycling. And on FEC this week, Simon and Martin...

Hello and welcome to a very special mini-episode of Front End Chatter, sponsored by Bennetts and www.bikesocial.co.uk – and it's the one where Simon and Martin, literally a quartet of spods in underpants, get to have a 10-minute chat with none other than the 2020 MotoGP World Champion, Suzuki's Joan Mir. It's short and sweet, a bit like Mr Mir himself.

Hello and welcome a fully festive, technically flawed, partially visual (which makes no sense to listeners in black and white) but otherwise entirely oral episode 129 of Front End Chatter, Britain's favourite motorcycling podcast helmed by Simon Hargreaves and Martin Fitz-Gibbons and kept afloat by the oceanic Bennetts, the bike insurance specialists, and www.bikesocial.co.uk, all your two-wheeled...

Ladies and gentlemens, pray welcome to Front End Chatter E128. Inside you'll discover presentation by the ineffable Mr Simon Hargreaves and the inestimable Mr Martin Fitz-Gibbons, plus their delightfully delictatious Mr Ben Nets, the bike insurance specialist, and wwwbikesocial.co.uk, the world of motorcycling on the webbage. And in this episode of FEC we have: Mufga's riding impressions of the ne...

Hello and welcome to Front End Chatter Episode 127, the slightly behind the curve episode, with Martin Fitz-Gibbons and Simon Hargreaves waffling along as usual – supported and enhanced by Bennetts, the bike insurance specialists, and www.bikesocial.co.uk, the home of all things two-wheeled and powered by an engine, internally combustible or electric or, indeed, propelled by little more than an in...

Hello and welcome to Front End Chatter, Britain's most paracorded motorcycling podcast Fronted by Simon Hargreaves, Ended by Martin Fitz-Gibbons and Chattered by www.bikesocial.co.uk and Bennetts, the bike insurance specialists. And in E126 we have: • Yamaha's overhauled, uprated and enlarged (but not in the way you might have read) MT-09 • Martin's unnatural desire to buy a Piaggio MP3, as winter...

Hello and welcome for Front End Chatter, Britain's best biking podcast, and Episode 125 of the aforementioned, presented by him, Martin Fitz-Gibbons, and him, Simon Hargreaves. And we are, as ever, enabled and legitimised by Bennetts, the bike insurance specialists, and www.bikesocial.co.uk, the wonderful world of woking on the web. And in this fun-sized Mars Bar of an episode we chatter about: ho...

Hurrah for wet roads, diminishing daylight and dropping temperatures. We're so excited about the onset of winter. Excited, excited, excited. Apparently, a study of the moods of the Nordic peoples shows a successful strategy for coping with long periods of little sunshine – and Seasonal Affective Disorder – may be to simply develop a positive attitude toward it. Literally, repeating "I am excited a...

Hello and welcome to Front End Chatter, Britain's nicest motorcycling podcast, with Simon H & Mufga, punctuated and perforated by Bennetts, the bike insurance specialists and BikeSocial.co.uk, home of news, views, road tests and Jammie Dodgers. And on this month's – hang on, it's been a month? – we chatter about: the closest, craziest MotoGP season since records began with exploding brakes, explod...