UKDOG

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Kawasaki Drifter, we've put the UKDOG website back up just to show how good things were back in the day.

      Hi my name is Paul and my wife is Les, we started the "UK Drifter Owners Group" (UKDOG) in 2002 ..tho we'd been working on it and putting everything together throughout 2001. I own an 800 Drifter bought new when they first came out in 1999 and straight away became very very enthusiastic about Drifters ..probably one of the most enthusiastic owners you will ever find, and even today after 25 years I'm still finding out weird and wonderful facts about the Drifter so I can keep my Drifter knowledge updated. Les owns a 2003 800 which she bought new and straight away had me respray it a beautiful blue & cream 2-tone. We attended the very first Drifter rally in America which was in 2001 and went on to attend more in the States, but it was that first Drifter rally that was the spark for starting the UK Drifter Owners Group mainly because there was absolutely no support or online help in the UK for the Drifter.

      I'm a time served motorcycle mechanic, ride pretty much every day of the year, rain, sun or snow on all types of bikes, spend hours restoring classic bikes and genuinely love everything about motorcycles. With the experience and knowledge gained from working on and riding bikes for decades ..coupled with my pasion for Drifters, I thought it'd be a good background in order to put a support group together to help other drifter owners, specifically UK owners.

      When we started the group in 02, the internet was still very much in it's infancy so there was very little in the way of reliable info online for Drifters and dealers knew nothing .. they still don't.! I called the group UKDOG because the US Drifter group had called their group VDOG (Vulcan Drifter Owners Group) ..in the States the VN model range is referred to as a "Vulcan" ..so it would be wrong to use the Vulcan name in the UK, especially when here we refer to them the same as they are badged.. ''Kawasaki'' Drifters.!

      UKDOG consisted of a message board/forum, one of the first multi-post and editable forums available back in 2002 (and long before Facebook took off in the UK) ..we also had a dedicated website that you see here. From day one of the launch of UKDOG we went from strength to strength, I contacted as many owners as I could find at bike shows, club rides, meets and online and we quickly built up a very enthusiastic group of Drifter owners with membership increasing weekly, to a point where in just a couple of years we had well over 200 members ..and before there's any quips about having members from other countries, we had 12 ..and they were listed on a separate "Associate Members list". 100's of messages were posted on the forum every month and at one point over 1100 messages in a single month and regularly getting 600 -700 -800 messages each month. That is what you call enthusiasm.

      Back then in the early days of the internet there were no easy build ''website packages'' that you could just click & buy to start your own website ..so Les, with her background in IT and being a software specialist very cleverly built the entire UKDOG website herself (To this day I don't know anyone who's ever done that.... and I don't think anyone will understand just how much work went into it ..literally hundreds of hours) ..and it worked an absolute treat. It was easy for owners to use and packed with everything we could find that was Drifter related and it was up-dated regularly.

      Our UKDOG rally's which were featured on the website with dates, pictures, followed by write-ups after each rally, were without doubt a huge success and were growing in numbers every year. We adopted the same appoach as used with the US Drifter rally's, with one main rally a year, but if anyone wanted a get-together then it was arranged in such a way as not to take away numbers from the annual event. We had prizes for best 800 and 1500, furthest ridden, charity donations etc, and with our Suffolk rally, Les & I had previously talked with vendors while we were at the ''International Motorcycle Show'' who very kindly donated loads of prizes for the charity raffle. UKDOG was a full on owners group with a ton of enthusiasm and big plans for the future, what could possibly go wrong...

      Well after a few years of building a very successful group, the next thing that happed was totally un-called for, backhanded, disrespectful, vindictive, call it what you will ..it was just spiteful. Out of the blue, someone clearly with a big problem decided to spoil the fun (we'll call him Bumhug.!) Without warning or any discussion (well not with me anyway.!) ..this person decided to start his own Drifter group and call it VDOGUK ..but rather than starting from scratch as we did with UKDOG ..he simply poached as many members as he could from UKDOG. The simple fact was.. there was absolutely no need for a 2nd group, it offered absolutely nothing new ..and if anything, only resulted in diluting the enthusiasm, causing upset and dischord and provided very little if anything in the way of technical or mechanical support .. proven by the fact that even now years later I still get calls and messages from owners in that group asking for help with their drifters, but essentially, It was the start of the demise of the what had become a thriving Drifter scene in the UK.

      After a couple of years or so It was obvious that the 2 groups could never exist without some kind of annimosity or fallout, there was a lot of bickering with keyboard warriors purposfully stirring the pot, but after some time of putting up this childish crap, I was now having to deal with a serious illness (Wegeners Granularmatosis ...Google it.!) This compounded the fact that many thought it had also got to the point where having 2 groups at loger-heads had completely spoilt the Drifter scene that we'd spent years building with UKDOG ..so much so, that for me and others I'd spoken to who had stayed loyal to group, it was simply no longer enjoyable, so after a couple of years of watching the UK Drifter scene fall apart , I gave plenty of notice and sadly decided to pull the plug on UKDOG closing the forum and the website we'd put so much work into.

      Today the Drifter scene in the UK is only a shadow of what it used to be, it does show that if "Bumhug" ..or anyone else for that matter, had been man enough and had the balls to talk out their problem 'before' creating a shit-storm and ruining a perfectly good group, then the Drifter scene in the UK would be in a far better place than it is today. As it happens, and it came as no surprise, "Bumhug" only reinforced his utter stupidity once again with his very own group, and watched his forum go down the drain without doing a thing about it. With that kind of behavoir, this really wasn't the kind of person you wanted running any group ..tho I only wish some people could've seen that before jumping ship so quickly.!

      For me, the thing I'll take away from UKDOG is the fun and memories of the large turn out of Drifters that we used to get at our rally's ..and I'm extremely grateful to those owners for that support ..especially those that also helped organise these excellent events. We were getting 25 or 30 plus Drifters at a time and it really was a sight to see ..and I'm sure with what we had in store the group would've certainly gone from strength to strength and without doubt UKDOG and the UK Drifter scene would've continued to grow bigger & better.

      At the end of the day, Les & I put our hearts & souls into building UKDOG with the best part of 10 years of sheer bloody hard work and a ton of enthusiasm, finding new members, sourcing spares & accessories for members, finding engine parts, doing complete resprays, repairing and servicing members bikes and anything we could do to help the Drifter scene grow.. we couldn't do any more... but clearly it wasn't enough for some.! Our sole intention was simply to help Drifter owners with the day-to-day running of their bikes. Sadly.. as we've all seen, there's always one or two bad apples.. the gobbies ..the shit stirrers .. the keyboard warriers and moaners who are more than willing to go out of their way in order to spoil something good for absolutely no reason.

      As a side note, It does amuse me to see that the other group is still using old pictures taken from UKDOG rally's from over 15 years ago on their FB page or when promoting their events and coincidently always showing a large turn-out of Drifters ..from old UKDOG rally's lol.!! Let's put that down to 'Artistic Licence'.! ... BUT.. and let's get one thing clear, if people think VDOGUK is the same Drifter group ..or a continuation of UKDOG (which I'm sure some do) ..it most certainly is NOT.!! It was made crystal clear to me that VDOGUK was started and ran specifically as a separate group and a very big point was made of splitting away from UKDOG. I was told this in no uncertain terms by "Bumhug" ..who soon after starting his group, went on to ban me from VDOGUK for absolutely no reason other than for who I was. My name was blocked on their forum and even ridiculed by one or two I thought were friends. It was made quite clear at the time that Les & I were not welcome, which was just really spiteful and childish after what we'd done for the Drifter scene. Once we were 'allowed' to join that group, just so we could at least go along to the odd rally or event, we found that the spirit we'd created in UKDOG just wasn't the same and the Drifter itself seemed forgotten about .. things had changed to a point that we felt more & more like outsiders and so that was it for us. We still have one or two Drifter people we keep in touch with now & again, but we're more than happy to not belong to any Drifter group anymore.

      Today it seems that the Drifter scene ..even world wide, doesn't have a clue how to move forward or provide anything mildly interesting in order to enthuse todays Drifter owners to come forward in order to try and bring the numbers back to somewhere where they used to be. Whether thats to attend a rally or post on what-ever random Facebook page that seems to spring up. Mind you, these days Drifter Facebook groups around the world seem to be started by any Tom, Dick or Harry hiding behind yet another fake profile by simply clicking a button on their device and knowing almost nothing about Drifters and so creating yet another faceless clique group.