Features

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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BSA B40 Derek’s riding goes back a long way, to before 1953 and emerging racing ambitions with a Mark Five 350 Douglas twin: “Not a proper racer like the 90 Plus, which was faster, but it handled beautifully, with all the weight of that flat twin low down,” he remembers. In those days you raced…

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Indian Chief At Christmas, a guy in the pub got talking about my bike outside. “The first motorcycle I ever saw as a child was an Indian, a huge bright red thing. My mother was ill and the doctor came to see her on it. I remember the sound of the bike coming up the…

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1952 Triumph Speed Twin In the 68 years since the new parallel twin set the fashion for decades to come, the world has been reminded to the point of complete boredom that Edward Turner designed it and that it went through a series of changes in its long life. So, let’s not go there yet…

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1956 Panther Model 100 Panther owners are an eclectic bunch. Take the owners' club stand at the Bristol Show for example. Next door, the Vincent OC, all precision, conformity and spit ’n’ polish. On the Panther stand, a double adult combo, two rare and immaculate pre-war Model 95s, and the ‘Panbeam’ – an intriguing amalgamation…

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BSA Super Rocket Bob Hall’s Super Rocket came from an impeccable source – a CBG Small Ad. “I saw the ad, called the chap and he said it was a really good one,” he remembers. “It was expensive though, but I went down to see it and took cash – got it for £500 less…

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Transform your ignition! Of course it would be rather pleasant not to have to do this job, but as they say in the army… “if you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t have signed up!” Realistically there is no one size fits all solution, but there are devices out there that can and will make…

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Men and machines forming the 1964 British Trophy team destined to ride in East Germany included (from left to right): Jim Sandiford, Sammy Miller, Johnny Giles, Ray Peplow, Ken Heanes and John Brittain A regular prelude to the 39th International Six Days Trial was the gathering of the British teams at the BSA sports ground…

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There are plenty of replica levers on the market Clip fixing and brake levers Some makers of early pioneer machines, such as Minerva, Sun and Hobart, often employed cycle-type brake levers rather than inverted levers as detailed last month to serve front brake and valve lifter or decompressor valve as appropriate. Others, exampled by Rudge,…

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