Innehållsförteckning för May 2024 från Classic Bike Guide

Welcome MORNING HAS BROKEN, FOLKS, LIKE the first morning. The light continues in the evening and hey, you don’t need all those jumpers! It’s glorious, and I for one cannot wait to get more riding in. The milder climes coordinated nicely with the BMW having to run in its new big end shells. As Maria was heading off early for a dog ‘flyball’ competition, I managed to not head back to sleep, instead taking a quiet, meandering ride to Lowestoft and the UK’s most easterly land, Ness Point. Too late for the sunrise, but the moody sky, quietness and view made up for it. Just don’t look round, ‘cause the industrial estate isn’t the prettiest… I’d left at about 6.30am on a Saturday morning with quiet roads and it was…

Going uphill fast Two weekends of classic adrenaline are promised in the Cotswolds and the Malvern Hills this June. Shelsley Walsh Hill Climb is more commonly the home of high-powered sports cars and older F1 racers. After the success of last year’s Bike Bonanza, the weekend is back on June 29 – and you can have a go! Paddock displays will include Suzuki motorcycles raced by British legends – Barry Sheene’s XR45 on which he won the 1984 Scarborough Gold Cup and TT legend David Jefferies’ 2003 Suzuki GSXR1000. Steve Parrish will do a meet and greet, there will be motorcycle club displays, Show and Shine, trade stands, interviews, live music and more. The high-octane event features everything from classic motorcycles to hotly contested roadgoing classes, all taking on the…

SELWYN STICKLER IS FED UP WITH PEOPLE telling him that his Benelli is just an Italian copy of a Honda CB500. “Look,” he says, “Benelli didn’t need to copy Honda to make a four. It was racing a 250cc inline-four back in 1939, and what’s more, it was liquid-cooled, supercharged, and produced 52bhp at 10,000rpm. That was eight years before Soichiro Honda bolted a 50cc two-stroke generator engine to a bicycle frame, and 20 years before the first Japanese four-cylinder motorcycle, so who copied who?” Selwyn has a very good point, of course. The Italians have a long history of making four-cylinder motorcycles. When Benelli announced in 1960 that it had built a four-cylinder 250, some thought even that was an inferior copy of the RC160 Honda had introduced a…

AS THE DUST SETTLED FROM THE SHAKE-UP OF Japan’s motorcycle industry in the early 1960s, a handful of manufacturers were left from the 77 that had existed in 1959. By 1963, as well as Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha, those still fighting their way into the showrooms included Bridgestone, Marusho, Tohatsu and Meguro, but soon these too would be gone. And one manufacturing behemoth was starting to appear in US showrooms: Kawasaki, or in those days, Kawasaki Aircraft. Kawasaki was making ships, trains, aircraft, tunnel-boring machines and all manner of heavy and light engineering products, including motorcycle engines, which were used by the Kawasaki subsidiary company, Meihatsu Industries, based in Kobe, for a range of machines in the 1950s. In 1959, Kawasaki opened a motorcycle R&D department and then opened a…

AFTER MAYBE THE SEVENTH OR TENTH time it happened, I began to wonder if there was something strange about me that I’d never suspected. Am I the only rider on the planet who occasionally stops to take photos of his bike in interesting places? A mere moment spent on the internet reveals that I am not even faintly eccentric in my tendency to immortalise some jolly motorcycling moments in a digital form. But for a while, I’d begun to wonder. Picture this… A beautiful, sunny day in beautiful mid-Wales (no laughing, please; Wales boasts several dry and sunny days almost every year) and I’ve pulled up to gaze in awe at a reservoir. It’s a glorious day, and even my nameless American motorcycle is running well, its manly exhaust beat…

What a wonderful photograph! Although slower than some of the racing photos of the day, it is still a skill to get the exposure correct and the rider in focus – as well as the fantastic landscape straight and included on what would have been a large-format camera. Plus the photographer may have had to get to the top carrying it! It was taken on the 1953 Scottish Six Days Trial (SSDT) and shows experienced trials star Ted Breffitt. Ted rode many makes in a career spanning decades, including Norton and Ossa, though here in 1953 he’s aboard a Sun with its Villiers engine. A lightweight bike from a great cycle manufacturer, he earned a first-class award for his efforts.…

THIS YEAR MARKS THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF the Sunbeam Motorcycle Club. Founded in, erm, 1924, it started with Sunbeam motorbikes, quickly welcoming all makes – the key was to have fun on a motorcycle, with sprints, trials, and more on the bikes, and dinners and social events off, too. The club now serves to help the maintenance and preservation of these incredible machines, with the pioneer run the pinnacle. But you can’t ignore a centenary – and where better to mark it than Brooklands, itself opened in 1909. The bikes we cover in Classic Bike Guide start loosely at post-Second World War, while the Sunbeam Motorcycle Club is largely for enthusiasts of pre-Second World War machines. A conundrum? Not really, as few need an excuse to go and see bikes…

ACCORDING TO MY MATE GEORGE, WHO bought a Yamaha RX-S 100 on a whim many years ago, there’s 12 horsepower and then there’s TWELVE horsepower. He was frankly somewhat taken aback by just how pokey the little 98cc single was – and he wasn’t the only one with that opinion either. For anyone who had previously sampled the factory’s similarly branded RS100/RS125, the RX-S was a bit of shock. Graced with less mass and increased power, the RX-S was like an angry ferret compared to the fluffy RS100 bunny. For a brief period from the mid-1980s through to the late 1990s, the RX-S 100 encouraged youngsters to have fun while putting a big grin on the faces of long-term commuters. Miniature power house Many of Yamaha’s earlier two-stroke singles were…

CBGYour guide to... SYMMETRICAL, RACY, AND A CELEBRATED design icon – few motorcycles hang together as well as the Mk1 Moto Guzzi Le Mans. And this particular rebuilt ‘Guzzi Mk1 could quite possibly be one of the best examples around. Belonging to Mike Peter (twice!), it has spent most of its 43 years in Fife. And, as some ‘Guzzi enthusiasts will have noticed, this magnificent 1970s superbike is not all that it seems. In fact, this very red ‘Guzzi ‘special’ began life as a royal blue 1980 Mk2 Le Mans. During the 1980s and 1990s it passed unrecorded through the hands of several owners; one, David Robertson, suffered a ‘big off’ in 1985 and as a result, the Le Mans was rebuilt with T3 side panels and a new front…

THERE IS A SCHOOL OF THOUGHT WHICH INSISTS that the very first example of a new model is the best. Theory goes that the very first machine to bear a supposedly iconic monicker (think Triumph Bonneville, Norton Commando, Ariel 3) is the model closest to the designers’ intent and the makers’ ambitions. This is easy with a Commando: the 1967 machine of that name was radically different to its featherbed predecessors and in prototype form looked profoundly new age – an orange seat, anyone? It’s possibly equally easy with the Bonneville, too; think of the original orange Tangerine Dream from 1958, although that was more of a T110 Tiger with an extra carb and bright paint than something extra-special. The Ariel 3? Just a small joke. Discuss? Opposingly, there is…