Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2025 i Classic Bike Guide

GREETINGS, ONE AND ALL, MAY YOUR OIL be cool and topped up and your visor down as that fly hits it at 50mph… We have been over to Gloucestershire for the Shelsley Walsh Bike Bonanza this month. The BMW took the jolly across the Midlands well, though allow half a day extra if you want to stay off the A14… Once there, the ‘78 machine was subjected to several spirited attempts at the hill climb, followed by a slog home. Quarter of a litre of oil and a dirty dinner at the services, but no numb bum and quite refreshed after more than 400 miles. What a bike. We didn’t take the Tribsa because we felt it was too far – which, after talking to Andrew Robertson (see page 40),…

SHELSLEY WALSH IS THE OLDEST- surviving motorsport venue in the world, still run on the original course. It is a charming, unspoiled place that you could easily ride or even walk by and not notice, such is the lack of furniture, grandstands, sponsorship hoardings and other modern signatures of a sporting venue. Just a ribbon of tarmac up a hill. And once a year, Shelsley and the Midland Automobile Club (MAC) celebrates bikes. It’s all for a great cause – the Midlands Air Ambulance Charity. Steve Parish was around all day and riding his RG500 up the hill, as were the True Heroes racing team, and some rather special bikes were brought by their owners. The fastest hill climbers were there, as were members of the Landsdowne Classic series and…

AS YOU GO THROUGH LIFE, YOU build up momentum. This keeps your life’s ride moving, going to work, doing what you need to do. But at some point, it’s good to jump off, take stock of what you’ve managed, what you still need to do and what you’d like to do. Reflection. Andrew Robertson wanted reflection. His wife knew he’d always wanted a Commando and fancied one as a project, so bought one from a friend and old bike expert Malcolm Ward, in 2018. A project it was. The engine was in boxes, but it was complete. Then Covid-19 struck, which, while dreadful for many people, gave Andrew the time to restore his 750. He’d restored a BSA B44 before and had learned an awful lot, which helped with the…

MOTORCYCLING HAS ALWAYS ridden the peaks and troughs. Fashion loves, then loathes, politics uses it like everything else and worldwide matters affect the popularity of two wheels but so far have not killed it. The working man’s commuter because they can’t afford a car is also the transport of choice for such current entities as Brad Pitt, David Beckham, Keanu Reeves and the future king of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, Prince William. This month, it seems, we’re cool. This bodes well for our latest potential high-volume seller, the BSA Bantam 350. A 350? Think back to the headline acts of the past: Triumph Speed Twin, Bonneville, Gold Star, SS100, CB750 and Commando, GS1000, 888, Fireblade, R1, S1000RR. Speed. Presence. They were leaders. Innovators. They were winners. How can…

MY TRIUMPH BONNEVILLE HAS been largely dormant since last summer, apart from an occasional start-up to make sure all is well, and the draining of the oil tank and a refill, in part to deal with a rare spot of wet sumping. Rather than go through the rigmarole of undoing the plug from the bottom of the oil-bearing frame tube, I removed the oil from the tank with my battery-powered oil drain pump, which, in retrospect, was a decision I would later regret, and it took quite a while to iron out the bugs that subsequently appeared. As usual, the T140 started second kick, which it does whether left for six minutes or six months, and all seemed moderately well after a brief ride around the block, so a longer…

THE BANBURY RUN IS THE ANNUAL feast of two-wheeled nostalgia for pre-1931 veteran and vintage motorcycles. Held in Britain’s leafy Warwickshire countryside each year since 1949 (except for 2020/21 owing to Covid), the 75th run took place this year on a sunny Sunday in June. It is claimed to be the world’s largest competitive event for bikes this old by its organiser, the VMCC/Vintage Motor Cycle Club – with 10,000 members, it is one of the world’s largest old-bike groups (the Antique Motorcycle Club of America has ‘just’ 11,000). Crowds of onlookers lined the 65-mile course, picnicking in the sunshine while an array of sometimes bizarre but very much historic powered two-wheelers pottered on by, providing the sights, sounds and smells of all our motorcycling yesterdays. I was fortunate to…

THE 31ST RUNNING OF THE TR3OC Beezumph annual rally was at picturesque Cadwell Park, in Lincolnshire. Spread over two days, the event always draws members from far and wide, with many different aspects, culminating in a track day on the second day. Though there were many vans and campers (hey, why not treat yourself to a little comfort), a large portion of the attendants rode and pitched tents, despite the weather being less friendly on the first night. The first full day was dull at first, with a little drizzle, but the smell and sizzle of bacon, sausages and beans was everywhere and cheered many up! Catching up with friends and making new ones was the order of the morning, and the National Motorcycle Museum was there with a range…

WHEN THE FUN SPONGES IN THE House of Commons decided that letting untrained teenagers loose on motorcycles with seemingly unlimited power in 1962 was a bad idea, those who hadn’t passed a test were relegated to 250cc machines. It caught the British motorcycle industry on the hop as hardly any manufacturers built a 250 that would appeal to a teenager apart from Ariel with the Arrow, or Royal Enfield, which made some impressively fast and unimpressively fragile bikes like the Continental GT. BSA made the stodgy C15 and AMC the clunky Matchless G2 or AJS CSR 14. There were many Villiersengined 250s, and the Francis-Barnett Villiers-engined twins were reasonably poky, but they were not the most reliable motorcycles. This dearth of fast 250s may have had a considerable impact on…

HERE IS A QUICK HISTORY LESSON for down the pub. The first production GS, the R80 G/S, rolled out of Berlin back in 1980. Despite multiple victories at the Dakar in 1981, 1983, 1984 and 1985 with a highly modified monster version of the road-going enduro, it was a slow burner in sales terms. In fact, it wasn’t until 1994 when the G/S morphed into the R1100 GS that it became anything more than a niche ride and even then, it wasn’t until 2004/2005 and the arrival of the R 1200 GSA that sales finally rocketed. But before any of that, the very first BMW GS, a prototype from 1978, was little more than a crazy idea to put a boxer engine in an off-road chassis and see what happened.…

MANY JAPANESE CLASSICS utilise emblems or badges on tanks and panels. Those fixed with screws don’t present too much of a challenge to replace, but what about the types that are secured by other means? This very challenge reared its head when I was working on my Suzuki TS400 and spotted that both side panels had been summarily repaired. Although what was there was functional, I wasn’t overly reassured that the fixes would major in longevity. Having finally sourced some decent replacement panels and had them painted, it was time to bite the bullet and get stuck in. To date, the emblems are still firmly affixed and in place. The big Suzuki vibrates and buzzes a bit, but that’s not affected anything. Similarly, days in the sun and overwintering in the…

Take part in Wayne’s World at Stafford Hugely entertaining special guests at the Classic Motorcycle Mechanics Show, sponsored by Carole Nash, at Stafford this October 11/12 are 1970s and 1980s racing legends Wayne Gardner and Roger Marshall. They put on a great show at Newark earlier this year, and their banter is not to be missed. Wayne, the 1987 World Motorcycle Grand Prix champion, made his 500cc debut in 1983 and achieved major success with Honda Britain, winning his first Grand Prix in 1986. He went on to beat legends Eddie Lawson and Randy Mamola to claim the 1987 World Championship title. Joining him on stage is his friend and former Grand Prix rider Roger. With 11 British Championship titles to his name, he rose to fame during the 1970s…

EX-PAT AMERICAN ROBERT LUSK passed away on June 9 at his home in southern England. He was 85 years old and had been resident in the UK since 1968. Bob Lusk was a born-again biker with a fascinating background, who was raised in rural New England, where he acquired the skills of many handicrafts, including leatherwork, and enjoyed a motorcycling epiphany at the age of 15. “I’d help out in a local gas station after school,” he recounted. “Each day, a bloke who commuted to work on his Triumph Bonneville would park it outside the forecourt. One day, I went over and sat on it, looked down, and saw the kick-starter, then put my foot on it, and it started – on its centre stand, thankfully! In that moment, the…

FEW PEOPLE KNOW THIS, BUT… MY very first motorcycle was a stroker. Just two-strokes, that is, and a single-cylinder to produce them. It was a 1959 (or thereabouts) Panther, relaxingly powered by 197cc of nebulous Villiers excitement. A friend’s weary mum had given it to the binman, and my pals and I rescued it. Plainly, it was just what a penniless schoolboy needed to wow the girls. Or not. This is not a story about a Panther, however many strokes it boasted. This is about something completely different, something oddly attractive – even to me, a noted fan of things four-stroke and mainly British. Welcome to the remarkable world of Bridgestone, who once offered a stroker about as far removed from that pedestrian Panther as it’s possible to get while…

I NEED TO APOLOGISE STRAIGHT AWAY. THAT standfirst reading ‘electric motorcycles’ is deliberately misleading. I’m not sure why I wrote it, and Matt the Ed may have changed it, in which case this column already makes no sense. An achievement of sorts, if not a particularly desirable one. If I hadn’t been aiming for a bit of eye-catching, which is tremendously popular in these strange days of clickbait and memes, I would have written ‘electric start motorcycles.’ Never trust anything written by a journalist. Maybe you have been as aware as I of the steadily increasing number of marvellously engineered solutions to the increasingly important ancient knees/kick-starting dilemma. Maybe you are still wonderfully young and fit and can start 650 Panthers merely by looking at them in a determined and…