No need, job's already done. If you know you want one they've planted the desire and it's in there, growing, developing. One future morning you'll wake up with a harebrained scheme your subconscious has cobbled together overnight - "if I cut back on the booze and the one night stands, work one shift a week in McDonalds, skip the house payments for a couple of months and set fire to the TA for the insurance money, then maybe, just maybe ..."

Don't leave it too long though and end up like all those middle aged FS1E / AP50 owners who are buying them 30yrs on as they couldn't afford them when they were 16. That's slow burn marketing; the sales department missed out but the spares dept is coining it.


I, on the other hand, have no idea what a KTM 1290 looks like other than (at a guess) it's an adventure styled 2 wheeler so their marketing department should be trying to convince my wife (the one of us with the money) she should buy one for me. Somebody else's money paying for my enjoyment; that's the kind of sponsorship I could buy into.

The same thing (wanting someone else's money to pay for my enjoyment) was just about the only topic of conversation when I worked at Silverstone circuit in the 90's. Most of the young drivers I knew there could just about fund themselves through the junior formulas (karting etc) with family money but moving up was going to need outside money which could only come through some form of sponsorship.

After many years of seeing how things worked out for various drivers you could see a pattern emerge. Unless there was some kind of USP (family name, gender etc) driving talent wasn't enough. You had to be a natural self marketer, the sort who could sell themselves first and the money would then flow. Almost always any money they got came from personal relationships with sponsors. The sponsors liked them (and had at least a passing interest in motor racing).
I knew people who were fairly mediocre drivers but great people persons. They got money year after year even with results that didn't merit it.

I also knew lots of really talented drivers who thought looking for sponsorship was a kind of mechanical activity - create proposal, send it to (hundreds of) companies, follow up with phone call and (not surprisingly) get rejected. Some of these people were very smart (some went to Oxbridge) but had less personality than the cars they were driving. One or two had the rare combination of both talent and personality. They're the ones I saw rise through the ranks.

The moral of my story - at our level selling what you're trying to do (ride through Africa in search of myself etc) is going to be a hard sell. Not impossible but probably harder than the trip itself. There is money out there but unlocking it is going to depend on more than just thinking what you're doing is deserving of other people's funding. Selling yourself first through building connections and with the trip bolted on almost as an afterthought is the only way it's going to work. If you can do that then you have no need of posting up a question on a forum like this. If you can't then do what the rest of us do - gawp and admire / criticise those that can and save up your money.