Innehållsförteckning för May 2025 från Classic Bike Guide

GREETINGS, OH MERRY, LIKE-MINDED souls. May your smile only be hidden by the fly you’ve just headbutted and your mind be full of tweeting birds. Or is that sound a dry chain… Creator (‘and founder’ as it’s so important to say these days – oh, take a break), contributor and columnist of this esteemed tome, the masterful Mr Frank Westworth, and I occasionally exchange emails. Thinly veiled as work, these exchanges quickly deteriorate into gossip, amusement, self-deprecation and nonsense. I learn much from this wise gentleman, and in turn repay Dr Wentwell by growing a beard and mocking. In one such volley, Sir Whitworth parried me with the above photograph. It’s in monochrome as back in the mists of time, colour hadn’t been invented yet, I’ve been told. It does…

Triumph and Hedon continue to back phenomenal Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride charity As fundraising for the fantastic Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride 2025 (DGR) kicks off, a host of prizes are up for grabs for the biggest fundraisers globally. Registration is now open for the DGR, which takes place simultaneously on Sunday, May 18 around the world. Supported by Triumph Motorcycles for the 12th year, the top fundraiser will win a Scrambler 1200 Icon Edition, with the Triumph logo in the gold script from 1907. Triumph will offer the winner a choice of the X or XE model. The second two top fundraisers and the Gentlefolk Prize winner will each be rewarded with a Triumph Modern Classic of their choice. Additionally, a limited-edition clothing collection featuring both the DGR and Triumph brands has…

IN THE NATIONAL MOTORCYCLE MUSEUM, Solihull, there is motorcycle that is full of holes. As part of a display of competition machines you can see George Brown’s Ariel Arrow Sprinter. Brown was a racer, sprinter, and what our American cousins might call a Bad Ass. Holder of multiple world sprinting records and racer of Vincents on the Isle of Man, he turned down offers from Norton and AJS to race for them, retired from road racing in 1951, and turned to sprinting with a vengeance. He campaigned his Nero and Super Nero Vincents and also broke the world standing and flying kilometre records on an Ariel Arrow, cracking 77.5mph from a standing start, 106.69mph from a flying start in 1961 with factory assistance. In 1966, on a motorcycle that was…

IT’S LIKE THIS. EVERY ONE OF US DESERVES A DREAM MACHINE. AN aspirational fantasy bike. Something unattainable but which is worth the relaxed effort of daydreaming. Some folk dream of Vincents, some of Brough Superiors. Others are less unrealistic and dream Honda Dreams, or something. For years and years, I maintained an unhealthy fantasy… not. Rather than whatever you may be thinking, I fantasised about owning my very own Matchless Model X. Why? Because back in the mid-1980s I found myself (a rare event indeed) acting as editor of the AJS & Matchless Owner’s Club magazine. One of its regular contributors was one Basil Chilvers, a refined and entertaining writer who was also a robust and resolute rider of AMC machines. He rode a couple, raced one, and had a…

AUSTRALIAN JACK FINDLAY WAS the privateer racer’s privateer. He was a man who epitomised the precarious existence of the band of self-funded, self-driven riders who filled the grids of European road racing during the 1960s. Racing every weekend in any event that would pay them at least a modicum of start money sufficient to live off, whether a World Championship GP or small town street race, Findlay and his companions were the supporting cast to the titanic battle between Japanese and European factory teams which defined what is widely accepted to have been a golden era of two-wheeled sport. This was captured for all time by French movie director Jérome Laperrousaz in his film Continental Circus, an atmospheric, against-all-odds epic starring Jack Findlay, accurately depicted as the underdog hero battling…

THE BEST ANSWERS IN LIFE ARE MOST often a compromise. But if you fancy looking at buying your first classic bike, the Far East is a pretty good solution to avoid pitfalls. Buying a classic motorcycle is buying into a previous decade – which one is down to you. But you are also buying into that decade’s technology, servicing and performance, and the older you go, the older the parts are! And the more change there is from modern bikes, so there may be more to learn, but many owners say there is more character the older the bike. In times past, an owner was presumed to have some mechanical knowledge of their bike. Even today, new riders are taught on CBT how to adjust their chain. A little knowledge…

THE FORECAST DID NOT FORECAST IT. THE CLOUDS DIDN’T HINT at it, and I never thought I would finish ‘The List’ of chores I had written – with help… Yet the other weekend, we found time to head out on the bikes. With the clocks advancing thanks to that old rule dating from 1916 to ‘get more done’ in daylight (echoes of a limp political slogan there), we have even more time. Let’s get the older bikes out. These dinosaurs get ethanol-free petrol in them for winter which reportedly doesn’t go off, so it’s drained and replaced by super unleaded, which I am thankful of as the golden elixir is eye-wateringly expensive. The alternative of cleaning carbs is a chore, and smelly, while rotting fuel pipes, which by essence sit…

LET’S GET ONE THING STRAIGHT, STRAIGHT away. I hate cleaning bikes. I always have. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to find yourself near one of my ‘regular use’ machines, you will be unsurprised to read that I really do not enjoy cleaning the things. I’m too often reminded of the great lyric from The Who: ‘Soap cost a lot, and dirt kept him hot’, from Silas Stingy – although I’m unsure of the advantages of dirt keeping your off-road engine toasty while plodding up another muddy hillock… Modern bikes are better, of course. Even I can clean a modern bike relatively painlessly, entirely due to the cheery fact that the dirt they magically accumulate comes off with a soapy brush and a hose pipe. This is because the dirt…

MIKE IS A FAN OF CLASSIC SPORTS motorcycles. For argument’s sake, we could even say ‘classic superbikes.’ For Mike has owned more than a few and currently parked in his garage is a gorgeous Moto Guzzi Le Mans 850 (featured in July CBG), a Norton Commando Roadster 750, Honda 400/4 and an extremely desirable Honda VTR1000 SP2. A committed track day fan and a Sunday Trials competitor, Mike is also familiar with ‘getting his knee down’ on a Ducati 996 and ‘foot-dabbing’ a classic Honda Twin-shock 200cc single around local Trials events. But as readers will have already guessed, lucky Mike is also the proud owner of this very desirable ‘mini-superbike’ plastered across these colourful pages. Familiar enthusiasts of the breed will no doubt have spotted this is no ordinary…

MOTORCYCLE JOURNALISTS have a lot to answer for, but one of the strangest obsessions the printed two-wheeled world has ever been guilty of was the late 1950s championing of full enclosure motorcycles, using bodywork to keep all but essential parts hidden away, that took the British motorcycle industry down a blind alley. Those writers of the 1950s and early 1960s were wildly keen on sanitising motorcycling. Exhausts should be near silent, they felt. Ever more extensive bodywork was the future. Panels should cover back wheels, front mudguards should be huge and heavily valanced, leg shields should be vast, there should be tall screens, and engines should be covered, presumably to stop you getting SAE30 on your brogues. The feeling among these scribes seemed to be that for the motorcycle to…