The rise of the grauzeiro: on the road with Brazil’s extreme stunt riders

Taken from the summer 2024 issue of Dazed. You can buy a copy of our latest issue here.

The straight-combed, long black hair, the puffy eyelashes, the blush, and all the pomp and circumstance. It might take a few hours for Bruna Nunes to dress up and put all her make-up on, but she’ll do it regardless – even if it means arriving a bit late to our Zoom interview. “If I’m not wearing my eyelashes and my hair is not clean and combed, I can’t show up in any video,” she laughs. Flaunting 600,000 followers on Instagram and posting selfies here and there, Nunes could be a trapstar, a famous actress or a model. But instead of catwalks, her runways are the roads of Brazil, which she tears down on a motorbike – and often on just one wheel.

“I’m a favela girl, I’m tough, I’m a grauzeira,” says the 24-year-old biker. A grauzeiro or grauzeira is a person who practises grau, which translates to ‘wheeling’ in English. But grau is more than doing stunts on a motorbike, its front wheel pulling high in the air. In Brazil, over the past few years, grau has grown into a youth phenomenon in the favelas and low-income neighbourhoods, leaving tracks across fashion, music, social media and even gaming.

“I love grau,” says Nunes, whose life revolves around pulling up her motorbike’s front wheel through narrow favela alleys. “It’s something that eases my mind; it gives me a thrill and a place to release my anger. When I’m on a motorbike, I forget everything.” The most famous female grau influencer in Brazil, she regularly updates her Instagram with videos and photos of grauzeira routines. There she is riding bikes with friends, trying out new stunts, shopping for flashy sneakers or running raffles to make money.

Grau is particularly popular in São Paulo, where Nunes lives. The Latin American megalopolis is home to 12 million people and 1.2m motorbikes, a number that rose by 43 per cent in the last decade, according to Brazil’s Institute of Geography and Statistics. The growth of delivery services operating in the country helps to explain this uptick. According to consultancy firm Euromonitor, Brazil leads the global ranking of takeaway app users. In São Paulo, this workforce mostly comprises young adults from underprivileged backgrounds. As soon as they get their driver’s licence at the age of 18, they start riding cheap bikes carrying packages and meals. “I used to be a courier, or as we say in São Paulo, a motoboy,” says Nunes, for whom grau is a job today. “But when I noticed I was doing good as an influencer, I quit my day job.”

Nunes’ journey into grau had modest beginnings. “Today you can find people teaching classes, but I learned the natural way, with friends and cousins, first with a bike and then a scooter,” she says of her years spent dreaming of top-tier bikes, before becoming her own kind of celebrity. Real bikes came later, as well as an understanding of how to handle torque, speed, brakes and balance. The bigger the bike, she says, the harder the grau.

Grau is a male-dominated world, and Nunes’s journey into the culture wasn’t an easy one. “I face lots of prejudice for being a woman doing grau,” she explains. “When I started posting videos there were a lot of people attacking me, saying I should go home and do the dishes. Today I don’t see this happening so much, and I also believe that, after I came up as a grau influencer, there are more girls into this.”

“Bruna is the first girl I’ve seen doing it,” says grauzeiro Marcio Vitor. “When we’re hanging out with the bikes and the girls are around, they like seeing us do the tricks!” This 26-year-old started in grau at an early age, pulling wheelies on push-bikes up and down his street. When he was 14, he was riding motorbikes and working as a deliveryman for a pizza restaurant. “My dad used to do this… grau is something that’s been around for a while.”

With little or no available material or research on the topic, it’s hard to pinpoint the moment wheeling culture grew into grau. On YouTube, a few 80s VHS clips show bikers on sports models like Hayabusas, doing wheelies and other stunts on the roads. But grau wasn’t the known term for the sport back then, with the word coming into usage in São Paulo in the 2000s. Now, there are baile funk songs dedicated to the lifestyle. “Fim de Ano” by MC Guill SP describes a New Year’s Eve in the favelas with bikes zig-zagging the streets, while “Quintal dos Robôs”, by MC Paulin da Capital, tells a story of a bike theft – its video has over 33m views on YouTube.

Baile funk intersects with grau culture beyond just song lyrics. In every major favela in São Paulo, Friday and Saturday nights are party nights. Massive soundsystems known as paredões take to the streets while hundreds of kids gather, mixing whisky with energy drinks and coconut water. It’s an opportunity for the grauzeiros to drop their best tricks, sliding amid the crowd or speeding up on empty spots on the asphalt. The bikes’ engines scream, a noise that melds with the music into an intense cacophony. “Every weekend we go to the bailes, it’s like a hundred bikes all around,” says Vitor.

“I love grau. It’s something that eases my mind; it gives me a thrill and a place to release my anger. When I’m on a motorbike, I forget everything” – Bruna Nunes

There are a couple of key manoeuvres in the grau repertoire. Once the front wheel is up in the air, one can go with no hands, swipe legs from side to side, stand up on the bike, zig-zag or scratch the vehicle plate on the asphalt, proving how high one can get with it. Speed and dexterity are crucial. Adrenaline, too, especially when the grauzeiro sees the flashing lights of a police car. “I’ve been stopped by the cops several times while on my bike, even while working, and sometimes I ran from them,” Vitor admits.

According to the Brazilian Highway Code, wheeling is not a crime if it poses no risk to pedestrians or other drivers, and if it’s practised in a private location with a licence. In 2022, the city of Belo Horizonte allocated just one street for the practice, but this hasn’t stopped grauzeiros from seeking thrills across the city. “It’s dangerous, my mom hates it, my dad can’t see my videos,” says Nunes. “Maybe if we had an area just for wheeling we could change some minds, but what we do is not just wheeling.”

While it’s true that a powerful vehicle rolling on a single wheel on the streets might be threatening, it’s also true that the grauzeiros raise eyebrows just for being who they are – primarily Black, working-class kids. “Everything that comes from favelas and low-income neighbourhoods in Brazil results in the distaste of Brazilian society, thus we have the criminalisation of grau as a form of state violence and repression against these kids,” says Samir Bertoli, a Brazilian creative director and stylist specialising in cultures hailing from underprivileged contexts.

According to Bertoli, it’s only a matter of time until the grau lifestyle influences street fashion. “Favela fashion has been slightly shaped by it,” he says. “We’ve seen that Alpinestars jackets are a trend now, just like other leather jackets that are usually bike accessories. It’s something that reflects the youngsters who love bike culture and make an aesthetic out of it.” Not by chance, there are even video games focused on the practice – like MX Grau, which has 10m downloads on the Play store.

Gaming might be a good, modern alternative if you’re out of bikes in the garage. Both Nunes and Vitor have sold their beloved two-wheelers recently, their sights set on better models. Vitor, for one, wants to buy a Tiger and become a grau influencer, possibly venturing into music, as Nunes has. (As MC Bruna VR, Nunes released a couple of hit baile songs in 2023, including favela-bikers’ love story “Casal 13”.) “Making music is my ultimate dream,” she says. “And there’s also the S 1000 RR, a bike that not everyone can pull a grau on.” Is she afraid of falling? “A grauzeiro who has never fallen… is not a good grauzeiro.”

Make-up NATÁLIA ANDRADE, talent BRUNA NUNES, MARCIO VITOR, photographic assistant FLÁVIO LUCAS, styling assistants LAITANIA GOMES, HUMBERTO MOREIRA, production DIEGO DOMINGO at SDC&P, production assistant ANDRÉ BRODINHO, retouching MARCOS NASCIMENTO