Innehållsförteckning för August 2023 från Classic Bike Guide

Welcome GREETINGS, DEAR FRIENDS. WITH ALL this wondrous weather, we hope you’ve been riding – so may your hard-worked machines be timed to perfection, their oil still looking clean and your brakes a-top notch! Oli had a curious June. Much of it was spent ironing out the bugs on the Aermacchi, while a trip to the Cheddar NCC show was curtailed when the Bonneville started to run on one-and-a-half cylinders. Rather than stopping and getting stranded on a hot afternoon, he turned around and rode home to discover one of the carb drain plugs and had left a trail of E5 down the A38... In Norfolk, we have been enjoying village shows and ride-outs, including an invite from the University of East Anglia motorcycle club reunion (thank you, all) and…

PRESCOTT HILL CLIMB, NEAR CHELTENHAM, could not be more ‘Heart of England’. Deep in the rolling Cotswold hills, with gentle breezes through wooded hillsides, the sound of a restored English Electric Type 37 diesel growls along a heritage rail line. Best of all, there’s a fabulous switchback of a smooth-surfaced hill climb track snaking through the trees. It’s owned by the Bugatti trust, known to love a sporting drive, and for one day each June is the venue for the Prescott Bike Festival, a motorcycling bash to raise funds and awareness for Severn Freewheelers, which support Blood Bikes. To date, the event has raised more than £200,000 for charities – and is well worth supporting. Though fun, many can’t help themselves and try their hardest. Hill climbing involves no warm-up…

IT’S 1978, AND APPARENTLY there’s a recession on. But don’t tell the motorcycle manufacturers of Japan and Italy. For the Japanese, the future was all about muscle. More cubes, more power, more camshafts... just more of everything. For the Italians, it was aesthetics, and in the case of Laverda, power. WHAT SHALL I BUY? Price new in 1978(ish)...Laverda Jota: £2500Kawasaki Z1R: £2008Honda CBX 1000: £2879Moto Guzzi Le Mans: £2239Suzuki GS1000: £1945 The Kawasaki Z1R In Japan, the leader of the power pack for half a decade was Kawasaki, though it 1000cc four was getting a little bit long in the tooth, and the fact was that it didn’t handle worth a damn, unless you did all kinds of fiddling with trick swingarms and new shocks and better tyres and fork…

OH BUM. MONDAY, 08.45 APPOINTMENT at the doctors. Rush to find some clean clothes (normally reserved for a Saturday). Pop some ‘shower in a can’ on (normally reserved for weddings and funerals), sink some porridge and coffee and prepare for the impending patronising, academic-minus-people-skills offering no solution. There’s never anywhere to park due to the locals all being retired lorry drivers or oil tanker captains, I presume, from their liberal, selfish, random sprinkling of dull cars, so it doesn’t take much of an excuse to pop out a bike that I can park inconveniently close to a driver’s door. The sun is out, it’s not too hot, and Maria’s Tribsa is closest to the door. Finding my jacket, gloves and an open helmet falling to hand immediately warms my ways,…

PART TWO AS PSYCHEDELIA GAVE WAY TO GLAM ROCK, motorcycle dealers struggled to keep up. Money was becoming increasingly more readily available; with just a small cash deposit, it was possible to buy almost any bike on hire purchase (HP). The 250 learner limit was now part and parcel of riding motorcycles and generally accepted as a minor inconvenience to getting something bigger. The Government’s apparent concern some nine years previously – vis-a-vis teenage mortality rates on two wheels – was arguably distant/remote at best and parsimonious at worst. It was still possible to buy a bike with no idea as to how to ride it, which must have led to numerous accidents and, presumably, fatalities. If a rider did want training, it was available via schemes like the RAC/ACU…

I’M SURE WE’VE ALL DONE THIS. I KNOW IT’S not just me, because many of my better friends – even those who appear at least decently rational, if not entirely sane – have used these very words to me: “This is a keeper. What a great bike!” After riding lots of bikes – hundreds, in my case – we finally stumble across a machine which is so much better than any of the rest that those fateful words, and some serious walletary damage, is the inevitable result. Pride of ownership is a wonderful thing, and we all know what pride precedes, do we not? Receiving the V5C, confirming us as the new keeper, causes a little fluttering in the heart strings, because that odd piece of paper binds you and…

KRAZY HORSE HAS DEALERSHIPS IN LONDON, the Cotswolds and Suffolk, selling all the coolest brands, like MV Agusta, Indian, Paton, Fantic and Norton. Plus, as it started by building coppers in the 1990s for itself, there are always a few stretched forks, low rigids and flames somewhere in the showrooms. Thanks to the success of being a shop to meet as well as just buying a bike, the team started hosting a band one evening a month, which has had riders, hot rodders and classic car drivers coming from far away to enjoy – so a festival seemed a sensible conclusion! The first Krazy Horse Weekender took over the cricket club in sleepy Bardwell, Suffolk, and offered a chosen selection of hot rods, classic American muscle cars and bikes, which…

I WAS STRANDED IN THE CAR PARK AT ALDI, having trouble getting my Aermacchi Sprint going. It just wouldn’t run on the kickstart, but it would if you bump-started it. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of hills round my way, and I’d been thrashing away at it for 40 minutes before a young chap in a hot hatchback kindly gave me a shove. I can only assume I was wearing my cloak of invisibility, as the couple parked next to me on the Honda Pan European didn’t acknowledge my existence. Young people, eh, with their kind hearts and thoughtfulness. Anyway, with momentum again, I popped into my local bike shop to pick up a spark plug for the thing, as one diagnosis was that it needed a hotter plug. Accurate,…

BRITISH MANUFACTURERS BUILT bikes with different styling for the American market way back in the 1950s as ‘export’ models, but it wasn’t until BSA-Triumph produced the X-75 Hurricane 750 triple, the Craig Vetter-designed street special, that the factory custom could be said to have properly arrived. A stunning looker, the Hurricane has passed into legend. Unlike a lot of later factory customs, it is one of the few bikes of its kind that people have turned into replicas by building them around stock bikes, possibly due to the incredible prices people started to pay for them. Less successful was the effort by a desperate Norton to replicate the success of the Hurricane. The Hi-Rider was a disaster after Norton tried to cash in on the chopper craze by fitting the…

I’M ALMOST SURE THAT ALMOST ALL OF US ALMOST ENJOY A challenge. I’m less sure that a challenge makes the world go round, but at times of considerable stress – and speaking entirely personally – I have always enjoyed a challenge. Not just as a distraction when times are tough, but as an opportunity for a little smug satisfaction when the challenge is overcome and a goal achieved. The recent variable hells of the various pandemic lockdowns were made much more tolerable by several two-wheeled challenges. I dug bikes from the darkest, dampest reaches of The Shed and did my best to make them work again. A couple hadn’t run for more than two decades, which is quite a while. However, none of my own challenges were as absorbing as…

A CLASSIC EVENT PACKED TO THE HEDGEROWS with classic motorcycles and cars? It’ll never catch on, I hear you thinking. Well, rub your eyes – as the photographs testify, The Rhynd Café Sunday Classic Meet has become a popular and well-organised event. Not only can you grab yourself a delicious bacon butty and coffee... spread over three fields and in every nook and cranny of this farming estate are row upon row of popular and precious classics – some quite rare. It’s an opportunity to get up close and personal with familiar and fabulous classics, or perhaps glean tips from proud owners or restorers who are usually found chatting with enthusiasts about their pride and joy. The event has been running successfully for five years and is held on the…

WHEN IT WAS FIRST INTRODUCED TO THE world in 1976, the Laverda Jota became an instant hit. Faster than a Kawasaki Z900, supposedly better-handling than a Ducati 900SS, it was every young rider’s dream bike. It was certainly mine... beautifully balanced lines, powerful 981cc, three-cylinder engine and that exhaust note thanks to the 180-degree crank’s off-beat firing order. And of course, it was, at that time, the world’s fastest production bike. What could be better? The original Jota was a tweaked version of the earlier 3C. UK importer Slater Brothers fitted a factory cam and piston kit and modified the front geometry to make it more competitive in production racing. The factory then incorporated these mods on the 3C and called it the Jota. Arguments persist about whether Jota means…

GEOFF WARREN FOUND THE BARE BONES OF this little 1963 Aermacchi Ala Verde (Green Wing) in a sorry state at a classic bike dealer in Somerset in 1991 and brought it back to life. He’s had it ever since. We spotted it on the Wells Classic Motorcycle Club stand at the Bristol Show this year and were immediately taken with it. Geoff told us he found the Ala Verde when the dealer was shutting up shop. “He had the remains of several bikes to dispose of. One Aermacchi had already been made from the best bits.” Fortunately, those remains of bikes were enough for Geoff to get started on and he was able to bring the almost forgotten Italian classic back from the dead. “There was an engine, some wheels,…