Minus Ten Review- 52

Jeff Kerkove ride announcement. These were the best!

Ten years ago on the blog I was doing then what I do now- retrospective posts on the year. Big surprise, eh? Ha! There was a ride announcement I posted though, which I know many locals might recall. The Jeff Kerkove gravel grinder rides of yore were legendary for their graphic designed announcements done by Jeff himself. The one from ten years ago is shown here at the left.

I find it ironic that Jeff is now sponsored by Gu Energy. His latest fat bike race win was written up for Gu here. I bet Jeff never dreamed that ten years after he winged out this ride announcement that he'd be where he is, still winning races and writing up a bit for Gu Energy. Crazy!

So, here's an idea for Gu, in case anyone reading this knows anyone there, or if someone from Gu Energy just happens to see this. Gu Energy should actually do a flavor called "Gravel Gu" and market it at some big event, say like the Dirty Kanza 200, where a lot of people would see it and Gu would get a big run of publicity out of it.

Why not? I think it would be awesome.

Anyway, here's another tidbit related to the altering of product labels, a thing Jeff used to do with some regularity back in the day. Trans Iowa v8 was upcoming and I had asked Jeff to render another header for the event, as he had for the previous seven. Well, he took the obvious route of altering a V8 juice can graphic to read like it was about Trans Iowa. It was absolutely fantastic.

It was up for maybe a week when I got a cease and desist e-mail from a Campbell Foods Incorporated lawyer. They were NOT amused, and asked that I pull the header or there would be legal action.

Damn fun haters!

So I rushed a quick e-mail off to Jeff requesting another header design. In the meantime, I pulled the V8 Juice header and put up a simple "V8" engine insignia from a Ford car until Jeff got the Ploughboy header which we ended up using done. So, there ya go, the only Trans Iowa to have had three different header designs.

By the way, for you T.I. trivia buffs- Trans Iowa v10 had two different designs for a header.

And that's a wrap on the Minus Ten Reviews for 2016.