Features

Look closely. Observe the falling bubble. The story’s in the story… Classic, Vintage, Old-timer, call it what you will – ‘Historic’ racing is an ever-more globally popular branch of two-wheeled sport, one which frequently attracts improbable participants mounted on unlikely bikes. Yet few come more unlikely than Japanese Yamaha tuning guru and Over Racing boss,…

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John Anstey: Shelves full of trophies “My dad had motorcycles, so I had a head start over a lot of lads. When I was 11 or 12 years old I used to `hang around with some older boys who rode a couple of cyclemotors on the heath. It was great fun and I asked my…

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‘Big Sid’ Biberman – a lifelong love affair with Vincent motorcycles. Both engines were the result of redesigning an existing single-cylinder engine into a twin, both companies began their motorcycle production using someone else’s engines, both companies enjoyed success on the racetrack and both Vincent and Ducati produced motorcycles that are viewed by their fanatical…

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Geoff Duke on the grid for the 1959 Ulster GP. He rode a 500 Manx Norton Six-time world champion and six-time TT winner Geoff Duke OBE passed away peacefully on Friday, May 1 at his home in the Isle of Man, at the age of 92. Duke was the first global superstar of Grand Prix…

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BSA Spitfire Scrambler In this old motorcycle game of ours, fate can sometimes play a decent hand by laying in front of us a certain path, which eventually results in a machine that originally was not quite what we had planned. Take Dave Dawson’s Spitfire Scrambler, for example; it actually began life courtesy of a…

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The first televised scramble took place at Beenham, near Reading in December 1954 and, as one might expect with off-road racing at that time of year, the muddy conditions made life extremely difficult and the meeting took place over a shorter course than normally used by the South Reading club. The BBC had previously successfully…

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Peter Howells’ Panther-Norton special In the privileged life of working for Classic Bike Guide and riding other enthusiasts’ machines, the emphasis naturally leans toward the immaculate, the beautiful, the elegant, the award winners. Just as newspapers give pages and pages to the catwalk shows of leading designers and the latest fashion trends, in the classic…

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Motorcycle Show at Earls Court, 1954 Geoff Duke opened his piece bemoaning the fact that there were ‘no drastic developments’ and most people might look back on the show as ‘average’. But he countered this gambit by discussing some of the more detailed elements at the show. For example, how the tidier front and rear…

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The riders pictured are getting ready for the start of the 1923 Leinster 100 Miles, the first road race to be held in the Republic of Ireland since the Gordon Bennett races in 1903. Today, Irish road racing still attracts a big following but back then an estimated 40,000 crowd lined the poorly surfaced 11…

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70s Triton Griff Jones’s Triton is built in the classic cafe racer style that Griff would have been familiar with as a youngster in London riding to all the local haunts such as the Ace Cafe. Towards the end of the show, when I managed to get more than a brief word with him, he…

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