Every week we’re going to be looking back at a previous Ride UK cover and find out a bit behind it. This week is Hoffman Bikes rider and Vans UK Team Manager, Mad Jon Taylor who graced the cover of Issue 39 riding Pipeline skatepark in Manchester massive indoor fullpipe.

‘Robin sent me this pic over of a cover I had years back and asked me to write a story behind the full-pipe thing. Anyway I looked at the cover pic and realized it was ten years ago! Holy shit time flies. Believe it or not this full-pipe fascinated me, it was so rad to ride and the more I rode it the more I wanted to go round it!

The guy that owned the park was well up for it and had a load of boxes for his other business next door, so we dragged them round and started filling up the pipe. You wouldn’t believe how many we needed to fill that thing so I didn’t kill myself if I bailed. Anyway with that done I then needed to work out how to get speed for this thing, – just rolling down the flat bank wasn’t going to cut it. So the only way this was going to have any chance of working was to do an air over the 20 foot wide flat-bank, out of this ten-foot quarter and into the other.  So I went ahead and tried it. It felt totally nuts, I must have tried it a load of times but never quite pulled it totally over. But hell it was fun trying it. I nearly shot out of the top on one try so after that I called it a day. But as I said before, that thing was so good to ride and I was stoked how the photo turned out.  Grotbags ain’t a half bad photographer. When I actually saw the cover I was totally blown away, and still have a copy of the magazine to this day.’

-Jon Taylor

LINKS: Hoffman Bikes, Seventies Distribution, Vans UK