Innehållsförteckning för November 2025 från Classic Bike Guide

GREETINGS, ALL CUSTODIANS OF machines old and older. May your lights be still working and your timing spot-on. Hope you’ve had a great month riding out, as those nights are drawing in and the temperatures start to fall, and our opportunities become less. But then it’s garage time! When this chapter of motorcycle journalism started for me 18 years ago, the first bike launch I attended was the Ducati 1198 superbike. Green isn’t the word for this ex-riding instructor. Turning up to Portimao circuit in sun-kissed Portugal and seeing a row of immaculately prepped red superbikes will be a memory forever, as will having to learn a tricky circuit on said bike, pretty damn quickly. Dozens of chiselled Italian engineers and mechanics watched on as I gingerly head out of…

Cleaner sustainable fuel available from the pump Fed up with fuel issues? Need something cleaner than clean while your bike goes into winter storage that won’t gum up the works or rot your O-rings? Motorcyclists, motorists, and race teams from Berkshire and beyond can now power their vehicles with an ethanol-free biofuel blend following the installation of the region’s first SUSTAIN pump at Richard Thorne Classic Cars, near Reading. The 1000-litre overground fuel pump, one of only two in the UK, offers accessible, high-performance fuel made in part from food waste and other sustainable content. Compatible with all engines that use standard forecourt petrol, SUSTAIN Classic Super 33 by Coryton allows drivers to reduce their environmental impact without replacing their current ICE vehicle. Compared to a standard E10 forecourt fuel,…

THE PACE OF MOTORCYCLE DEVELOPMENT IN THE 1960s was astonishing. These days, a major manufacturer might spend two years on a new paint scheme and announce it with a full media launch and mass of information, while a revised set of switchgear is treated like a space rocket launch. In the mid-1960s, they did things slightly differently. Kawasaki had tried and failed to build motorcycles in the mid-1950s with the Meihatsu brand, and then in 1960 entered into a partnership with Meguro. Kawasaki was very much the senior partner in this enterprise. It was not called Kawasaki Heavy Industries for nothing, making ships and turbines, railway locomotives, and, most famously, aircraft. Indeed, the company’s first motorcycles were badged as Kawasaki Aircraft, which was a ballsy decision for a company with…

ALMOST 30 YEARS SEPARATED MV Agusta’s 750 Sport of the 1970s from its 21st century descendant, the 750 F4 Serie Oro. They made a mighty handsome couple, the racy four-cylinder machine that established MV Agusta as a superbike manufacturer on its launch at the Milan show in 1969 and the limited-edition four with which the famous old marque was spectacularly reborn at the same venue in 1997. My chance to ride both bikes came in 2001 thanks to the generosity of their owner, the late Alan Elderton. The then chairman of the MV Agusta Owners’ Club, who sadly died in 2009, was a quietly spoken and hugely knowledgeable marque fanatic. His garage contained numerous classic MVs, most of them small-capacity models in various states of repair. Having persuaded Alan to…

Back in the 1960s when British motorcycle manufacturers reigned supreme, in the lofty offices of Small Heath, Meriden and Plumstead, the bosses paid little mind to customer feedback; it usually took a collective of important US dealerships to get anything done. New models were released each year, but the changes were usually limited to new paint schemes and replacing poorly designed parts with slightly less poorly designed parts. The very idea of asking the customers what they wanted, or indulging in any other kind of market research, was treated with disdain. Things have changed, thank goodness. These days, the customer may not be always right, but their opinions are generally considered. That being said, few manufacturers go into new model development launches on the scale of the latest campaign by…

ONE OF MY OWN VERY FAVOURITE BIKES – OF ALL BIKES, not just a small subset, like 250 Singles, or similar – is the BSA (or indeed Triumph) oily-framed 250 built in 1971. I really like them, and at great cost to both my sanity and my wallet, I’ve owned a few, a couple of them for more than a decade each, which is a long time. A bike I’ve only ridden but never owned is the predecessor to those 1971 BSA B25SS machines – that’s correct, the bike you can see here, the Starfire. The recipe was simple: bring BSA’s learner-capacity single, a machine with heritage starting with the 1958 launch of the C15 Star bang up to date for 1967. BSA certainly supplied that bang. The C25 Barracuda…

YOU WILL BE AT LEAST AS AWARE AS I am of the currently somewhat subdued state of the old bike sales scene. Tales of gloom, doom, and despondency abound – in fact, I’ve just sold a couple of bikes myself, taking quite a hit on one of them, a result which did not entirely fill me with joy unbounded. But hey, it’s a loss on an old motorcycle, not the end of the world. Call it depreciation instead and it sounds less uncomfortable. Who buys old bikes as investments anyway? Answers on a used tenner to our editor. I’ve been chatting with chums about this, and we are just about in agreement that if a market declines, there should be bargains galore – opportunities for skinflints like me to finally…

ROAD RACING HISTORY HAS LOTS OF fascinating footnotes, many about bikes which for one reason or another weren’t very successful. One of these is the story of the very last motorcycles carrying the BMW badge to go racing using a factory-built race chassis from the German manufacturer’s Munich base. No, not the 990cc BMW MotoGP prototype built in Italy by Oral Engineering for the German manufacturer, as tested by Luca Cadalora in 2006, whose engine essentially comprised three cylinders off a BMW Formula 1 car engine, nor the abortive R1 desmo Boxer prototype of 1991 – neither of which actually raced. Instead, this factory footnote tells the tale of a bike created in America with the help of BMW’s own engineers, which represented the first steps on a trail that…

IF EVER THERE WAS A SHOW IN WHICH delights lurk around every corner, it’s Stafford on an October morning. The Classic Motorcycle Mechanics show, like the International Show in April, has its own distinct attractions, with autumn’s main focus being machines from the 1960s to the 1990s, which gives plenty of variety. Right out of the gate there was one of the finer examples of British street sleeper, the double-take-tastic Norvin of Gerry Fry. It was built by taking the frame of a crashed early Norton Commando, cutting out the damaged lower frame tubes, offering up a Vincent Rapide engine, and discovering that the swingarm spindle on the Commando frame matched that of the Vincent suspension pivot, then swapping the rear cylinder head for a front unit to keep the…

FOR ALL ITS TWO-STROKE RD350LC HERITAGE, Yamaha is the Japanese company most closely wedded to the performance four-stroke, twin-cylinder format. And its ultimate manifestation for many fans is the TRX850 sports twin launched exactly 30 years ago in 1995 on the Japanese home market. That’s when ‘Trixie’ Yamaha followed her ring-ding sister ‘Elsie’ onto the two-wheeled design catwalk – so Trixie, This Is Your Life. Long before it conceived today’s best-selling MT-07 line-up, Yamaha has regaled customers for the past half-century with an array of twin-cylinder road bikes around the globe. Models like the XS650, the XS500 which was the first eight-valve Japanese twin, the spectacular failure that was the TX750 despite being the first bike ever to be adorned with vibe-sapping twin counter-balancers, the XV920/TR-1 range of un-Italian V-motors,…