Photos and text by Kati Dalek of Kayadaek Photography…
Sand in your eyes, salt in your mouth, the sea in your boots…The Malle Beach Race! A weekend somewhere between a chaotic moto-dream, a British seaside holiday, and a full-blown motorcycle-fueled riot.
For two glorious days, Margate Main Sands transformed into a roaring arena of custom bikes, vintage racers, inappropriate machinery, flat trackers, mopeds, modern classics, and absolute deathtraps that probably should never have touched sand in the first place. Which is exactly why everybody loves it.
The madness kicked off on Friday with the legendary Malle Rally 100. A 100-mile road rally winding through the beautiful Kent countryside. No stopwatch heroes. No polished race paddocks. Just riders and drivers getting gloriously lost together before rolling straight into the official Malle Beach Race Pre-Party at the legendary The Rag & Bone Man Workshop.
The racing starts on each race day as soon as the tide is out and there’s a race track. Perfect tide times meant the racing could begin the second the sea pulled back, giving riders and spectators full days of non-stop action across every imaginable class.
From modern customs and electric bikes to antiques, lightweight machines, and off-road racers tearing across the wet sand at full throttle. As soon as the beach appeared, Margate became motorcycle paradise.
The air filled with salt, petrol, two-stroke smoke, and burning clutches. More than 500 racers lined up across the weekend, riding everything from purpose-built flat trackers to wildly inappropriate customs that looked barely capable of surviving the ride to the beach — let alone racing across it.
That’s the spirit of Malle. Nobody comes here expecting perfection. The whole point is to show up, pin the throttle and embrace the chaos.
Sand in your eyes, salt in your mouth, sea water in your boots! This is beach racing at its absolute best.
Founder Robert Nightingale perfectly sums up the philosophy behind the event by saying the focus is always on “completing, not competing,” often reminding everyone that: “No one is expected to win, in fact, we’ll all lose together, in style.”
And that’s exactly what makes the Malle Beach Race so special. The event embraces true “run-what-you-brung” racing culture, where riders are expected to fall, splash, laugh, and keep going!
Whether they arrive on a cutting-edge race machine, a battered custom build, or an ancient moped held together with zip ties and hope.
But what truly makes the Malle Beach Race unforgettable is the people. It doesn’t matter if you arrive on a hand-built custom motorcycle, an old scooter, a race bike, or simply as a curious spectator! Everybody is welcome here.
Within minutes you find yourself deep in conversation with complete strangers about motorcycles, road trips, bad ideas, and beach racing stories from years gone by. There’s a rare openness to the whole event that feels increasingly hard to find in modern motorcycling.
Someone is always offering you a beer, helping fix a broken bike, sharing tools, giving directions, or dragging you into another ridiculous conversation while the sound of roaring engines echoes across the beach. The atmosphere feels less like a race event and more like a giant crazy family reunion fueled by petrol and sea air.
The furious Sprint Race sent riders head-to-head down an eighth-mile stretch of wet sand, while The Double pushed things even further. A quarter-mile sprint with racers charging around the beach marker before blasting back toward the finish line in full throttle.
The Malle Go Round delivered one of the weekend’s biggest highlights: seven motorcycles lining up for flat-track style racing with a full Le Mans running start directly on the beach.
Then there was MotoPolo — teams battling head-to-head in one of the wildest and funniest spectacles on two wheels. Equal parts competition and total mayhem.
And finally came The Derby — the grande finale knockout sprint race where the final ten racers from every class lined up for one last all-or-nothing showdown on the sands.
Every kind of motorcycle had a place at the Malle Beach Race. Lightweight classes brought scooters, mopeds, and motorcycles under 250cc screaming across the sand, while the Classic and Antique categories celebrated beautifully preserved vintage machines from before 1979 and even pre-1965 motorcycles still battling against the tide.
The Mallecross class unleashed pre-2005 MX and enduro bikes into the chaos, while the Scrambler category filled the beach with road-legal off-road machines throwing sand high into the air.
The Women’s Class once again highlighted the incredible female racers of the event, alongside women competing fiercely across every category throughout the weekend.
And of course, the heart of Malle remained the wonderfully eccentric Custom & Modern Classic class. Packed with choppers, brat bikes, café racers, hand-built customs, and beautifully inappropriate creations that perfectly embodied the “run what you brung” spirit of the event.
And somehow, in the middle of all this beautiful chaos, James Hitchcock stormed to victory in Sunday’s dramatic Derby Final aboard a Honda Fireblade. Watching a superbike ripping flat-out across a beach while spraying huge walls of sand into the air is exactly the kind of wonderfully stupid spectacle the Malle Beach Race was built for.
The winner’s trophy is handcrafted every year by the legendary “The Rag and Bone Man”, built using donated parts from the previous year’s winning motorcycle. Turning broken race parts, scars, and mechanical history into one of the coolest trophies in motorcycle culture.
While there are trophies and winners crowned at the end of the weekend, the true spirit of the Malle Beach Race has always been about “the art of losing” together. Celebrating style, friendship, community, and glorious chaos on the sands of Margate.
But the racing is only half the story. Because everywhere around the track, the entire Malle universe was alive. The Beach Race Village was packed with partner exhibitions, “The Art Of Machine” showcase, beach games, cold beers, coffee stands, street food, ice cream, and hundreds of spectators soaking up the atmosphere.
Kids played in the sand while old Triumphs, 80s MX bikes, and race bikes thundered past only metres away. Fun in the sun Saturday and fun in the relentless wind Sunday. Perfect conditions. And somehow the whole thing felt beautifully out of control in the best possible way.
Yet behind all the noise and chaos, the organisers once again proved how seriously they take protecting the environment that makes the event possible. Malle continued working closely with marine biologists throughout the weekend to minimise environmental impact and ensure Margate Sands was left in excellent condition once the racing was over.
This is not about lap times. It’s not about factory teams or polished race results. It’s about showing up on anything. It’s about ripping around in the sand, having the odd fall, spraying each other with salt water and “generally having a good time.”
The Malle Beach Race feels raw in a way modern motorcycle culture often forgets. It celebrates creativity, bad ideas, friendship, community, and machines that probably should not exist.
By Sunday evening, everyone was exhausted. Bikes were covered in salt crust. Riders were bruised, sunburnt, and grinning from ear to ear. And somehow, nobody wanted it to end. Margate proved once again that there may be no better place on earth to ride motorcycles completely inappropriately.
“Time & Tide Wait For No Man.” The next chapter of the madness is already set: The Malle Beach Race returns to Margate on May 14th–16th, 2027. See you in the sand next year!
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Katja Dalek | Kayadaek Photography
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More Malle Mile…
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As usual, the Malle Mile event looks like it was a real hoot! Thanks for all of the great photographs.
What a great piece‼️
Definitely my kind of folks doing my kind of activities.
Looks like wwaaayyy too much fun, which is precisely why I’m so jealous of them.