Design A Rail Winner

by Tim Woodhead
01 / 07 / 2009

Before we announce the winner I must just say a huge massive and gigantic SORRY for the time it has taken for us to announce the winner of this contest! There is no excuse really for our tardiness but I can’t describe now much stuff we have going on! The rail is actually almost finished being built, we just haven’t found time to make this web article. So again, a big sorry and you have permission to smack our backsides when you next see us.

The decision to pick the winner was a lengthy process because there were so many variables coming into play. To start with we had a budget, £3000 and not a penny more. The rail is going into Princes Cable so there is insurance, risk assessment and health & safety to think about. Next up is it has to be useable for all levels of riding and can’t have an ollie on. We chatted with the Relentless Team and the staff at Princes Club and from all the designs we looked at, anything with a wall ride kept jumping out at us. The transfer rails would have won but for the fact that the insurance would deem it near impossible. The over sized mail box from Andy Mora was so close to winner, it is a very unique design and I can promise you that we will build something very similar at one of our events soon.

As I said we’d decided that the winning shape was going to be some kind of wall ride. Princes and Relentless rider Jonty Green just wanted a steep and high wall ride so you boot off it! When it came down to it there wasn’t one perfect design that we could build, but the closest thing was James Mackay’s wall ride with a kicker, which we have picked as the winning rail design. We won’t unfortunately be able to build the kicker part of his design but it is close enough. We have designed the metal frame work for the wall ride and we are going to build it as big as we can with the money available. The wall ride is perfect because it ticks all the boxes with regards the variables we had to adhere to.

So huge congratulations to James Mackay, you are getting your wall ride built and are going to Relentless Wakestock VIP style!!! Plus you won’t have to pay to ride at Princes Club for the rest of year! James is a very worthy winner because he submitted such grand designs that Kevin MaCloud would be proud of him! In fact if we had no regulations, no budgets then it would have been James’s ‘C’ shaped fun box which would have won.

Check out some of James’s designs and we hope you can join us at Princes Club for the launch of the wall ride this July. Keep checking AllianceWake.co.uk for the date as it’s confirmed.


First Place: James Mackay
Princes 2009 Season Pass & 2 VIP weekend tickets to Relentless Wakestock

Second Place: Free day pass at Princes Club so you can hit the Wall Ride. Andy Mora, James Young, Andy Fisher, Douglas Anderson & Ellie Taylor

Everyone else who entered the design a rail contest gets a 2 for 1 pass at Princes.