On The Pegs June 2020 - Volume 5 - Issue 6 | Page 147

On The Pegs VOL. 4 ISSUE 7 - July 2020 147
based in the Lancastrian market town of Bury in the North West of England
where instead of mom’s apple pie you can expect to find the World’s finest black
pudding – to the uninitiated, that is a heavily-spiced blood sausage.
Founded by Jake at the tail end of 1998, G2F – or to give it its original moniker
of Gone 2 Far Promotions – has done a ton of cool things. From managing the
careers of some of the planet’s leading motorcycle riders to creating groundbreaking
apps to staging high-profile, one-off events to running and revitalising
the FIM Trial World Championship, G2F’s CV is very impressive.
Every journey starts with a single step and G2F’s began in the November of
1998 in a stone-built two-up, two-down cottage. An Essex boy by birth, after
working in his dad Reg’s bike shop in Colchester and contesting a handful of Trial
World Championship rounds Jake moved north to work as a minder for Betamounted
Robert Crawford and, through the Italian marque’s UK importer John
Lampkin, he first crossed paths with Dougie.
“When I moved north Dougie was barely a teenaged kid. He used to come and
sit in the garage while I was working on Robert’s and Steve Colley’s bikes and we
used to take him practising sometimes.
“After I packed up minding I worked for The Awning Company (formerly GH
Awnings) for six-and-a-half years. While I was there, certainly during the latter
stages, I was looking for extra income. I wrote for magazines, imported the Amigo
- Mecatecno kids’ trials bikes and ran the first trip to Bercy before there was an
indoor trial in Sheffield – I was always trying to be entrepreneurial.“I suppose my
way of thinking was that if I could do that one day a week and earn money, why
shouldn’t I do it five days a week and be in control of my own destiny? My time at
The Awning Company came to an end amicably and I have to thank Gary Harthern
a lot. I learned so much being his right-hand man. He is a very hard-working
entrepreneurial person and he inspired me to do my own thing.”
When the time came to finally go it alone, Jake plunged in both feet first despite
his parents’ initial reservations.
“It was a fairly brave move I think – we had just had our first child – and my parents
were mortified. When I left GH Awnings they asked what my plan was and
I said ‘I haven’t got one’, but things developed pretty quickly. There was income
coming in from writing for magazines and at one point, working with Ray Archer,
we had about twenty-five per cent of DBR and twenty-five per cent of MXUK
content wise.”
The move that put G2F on the map was when Jake signed up Dougie Lampkin.
Already a World champion, Dougie was the hottest prospect on the global trial