If you’re one of the 8.3 million people who have seen Icon’s Drift 2 video on YouTube, you probably saw the Roaring Toyz logo pop up – after all, our custom single-sided swingarms gave the Triumph Speed Triples an extra kick of drifting style and six inches of stretch. Nick “Apex” Brocha and Ernie Vigil are on the run from the local law, and they ride every direction but straight as they navigate twisty mountain roads.
You’d expect that Nick and Ernie spent a lot of time practicing on the Triumphs, especially once the Roaring Toyz swingarms were installed.
You’d be wrong.
“We didn’t break them in,” says Ernie. “The video came together really quickly. We had a four-week window to get these bikes ready. The day leading up to us leaving for Portland to shoot, we had just gotten the swingarms on and gotten them painted. We went to Portland with bikes that had zero miles on them.”
Nick says that jumping on the brand-new Triumphs and immediately flogging the hell out of them wasn’t that hard. “This bike could be ridden more like a race bike because we kept the swingarm shorter: it’s only six inches over. That swingarm was really all we needed to make it a capable drift bike,” he says.
“Robert Fisher had never built a single-sided swingarm for a Triumph, so it was a Hail Mary going into it for everybody. He had to engineer it to a standard that would keep us safe when we’re out there on the motorcycle. We relied on Bob to take care of us,” Nick says, adding that his swingarm was installed the night before the shoot…in his hotel room. Luckily, installation was quick and easy.
“The swingarms are a thing of beauty,” Ernie says. “I’ve never seen anything that had that kind of craftsmanship. To open a box and see a swingarm built out of one chunk of billet and without a single weld, it just blew my mind. The bike is on the showroom floor of my local dealership now, and people just flock to it. Bob outdid himself on this one.”
Nick and Ernie make the drifting look easy, as does “Officer” Dan Brockett in his Mustang chase car, but Ernie insists that they were all at risk. “That place where we filmed, there were 200-foot cliffs to rock bottom. If you flew off the cliff, you’d be dead. There were times when we’d almost be in the dirt, or Dan would be in the dirt. People don’t see that 200-foot cliff, and all it would have taken would be something little going wrong,” Ernie says.
Despite the danger, everyone had plenty to laugh about when Dan ad-libbed his lines. Nick and Ernie both name Dan’s scenes as their favorites, including one that wound up being cut: Dan performed the whole scene with a Russian accent.
Fans of the Icon Drift videos can expect more installments in the future. Nick says, “I’m really looking forward to the next one. Whenever you wrap one of these up, you’re always thinking about the next.”
And so are we. Look for more innovative Roaring Toyz parts in future Icon Drift videos, or go watch Drift 2 again. Just watch out for that rattlesnake.