The blog

Fourteen years of filming other people keeping their feet up, and we finally cracked and made you do it yourself. TOAST TRIALS — Sodium Yard is live now, free, in your browser, at /game/. No install, no app store, no nonsense.

The setup: night shift at Flathouse Quay. Someone’s pushed a trials moto through the gap in the fence and chalked five sections across the freight apron — the pallet yard, a crate gap over the water, the spool line, the freight stack, and a real twenty-foot container to ride through and over. Five controls, that’s it: accelerate, brake, lean back, lean forward, jump. If you can work a W key you can embarrass yourself immediately.

“Dabs cost 1. Every single one goes on the card. Yes, that one counted. We saw it.” — THE SCORING, BRIEFLY

Scoring is proper ICU observed-trials rules, because if we’re doing this we’re doing it right: dabs cost 1 each, cumulative; a fall costs you the section; there’s a two-minute time cut per section; and entry and exit are judged on the front axle. Lowest penalty wins. It is exactly as unforgiving as a real observer with a clipboard, minus the weather.

Your best runs save locally as a guest, so you can grind your penalty down in private before anyone sees. Accounts and the leaderboard are rolling out now — sign in and your guest best carries over, then it goes on the board where the rest of us can judge it.

Through the fence →

Every now and then the lens gets pointed at someone operating on a different plane, and you just try not to fog the glass. Charlie Rolls is one of those. He’s featured in our photography and Instagram work rather than the YouTube edits — and he is now, officially, UCI Trials World Champion, taking the elite world title in Riyadh in 2025 aboard a 26-inch street machine.

The backstory reads like a trials fairytale with more bruises. He started competing aged six, learning his trade on a self-built trials course on the family farm in Longstowe, Cambridgeshire. His game is technical urban trials — rail rides, gaps, drops and surgical balance — the exact vocabulary this site has been filming on Portsmouth street furniture since 2012, executed at a level that makes the rest of us look like we’re assembling flat-pack furniture.

“Silver in Abu Dhabi in December 2024. Gold in Riyadh in 2025. That’s not a hot streak, that’s a trajectory.” — THE PALMARÈS, TRANSLATED

And the title didn’t come from nowhere. The run-up: UCI World Urban Games champion, European champion, British national champion, multiple UCI Trials World Cup wins in 2024, and World Championships silver in Abu Dhabi that December. He now ranks among the world’s top ten. We’ve been lucky enough to shoot and collaborate with him, and the standing policy remains: the lens points at the best when it can.

More on Charlie and the rest of the crew on the about page. Stills on @toastbikes.

RadFest editions are supposed to get whole numbers. The first one, in 2013, was the scrappy jam that grew into the crew’s defining event. Then, before the diary said we were due another one, everybody turned up anyway — and that’s how you get an edition numbered 1.5: the in-between-years jam that proved this crew never needs much excuse to ride.

The film — BIKE TRIALS | RADFEST 1.5 | TOAST BIKES — is sitting in the events shelf of our film archive, and it holds up. No anniversary, no occasion, no reason. Just riders, street tech, and cameras that were coming along whether the calendar approved or not. Half a RadFest turned out to be a whole day’s worth of riding.

“An in-between-years jam proving the crew never needs much excuse to ride.” — THE FILM ARCHIVE, ON RADFEST 1.5

Where does 1.5 sit in the lineage? The chapter list runs 2013 → 1.5 → 2015 → 2016 → ’19 → 2020’s “Not Radfest” → 2022, and every one of them got filmed — from the raw-clips reel of 2016 (no music, no edit gloss, just makes, near-misses and the sound of tyres on steel) to the crew’s defiant, distanced answer to 2020. The half-step is the one that tells you the most about the crew, though: RadFest was never really about the date on the poster.

Watch RadFest 1.5 and the rest of the RadFest films on the films page — filter by events and clear the afternoon.