Features

Norton Navigator "There’s a Lotta Torque about Norton” – so went the company’s advertising slogan in the early Seventies, immortalised by the photograph taken at the Ascot Park Flat Track in 1972… Big-muscled parallel twins are the bikes Norton is best remembered for – a tradition continued by the new models trickling from the Donington…

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Bikers arrive at the ball The Busy Bee, the Ace, Johnson’s… 59 Club members certainly get around the local coffee bars. On Tuesday night last week they added yet another to their list. It’s in London’s swanky Park Lane – any avid Monopoly player knows that well enough. They call the place the Dorchester. From…

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BSA Gold Star, and this is one of the best I don’t know about you but I’m in awe of those talented individuals who, with ease and a minimum of fuss, step up to lathes and milling machines and casually fashion special items to make their machine stand out. Part of this awe comes from…

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Suzuki T500 Focus in on a Kawasaki Z1 or a Honda 750/4 and you pretty much know what you are likely to get; 1970s superbikes with all the hype, cost, alleged kudos, etc. What you also get are the inevitable rivet-counters who come as part of the ownership experience. These perverse individuals will almost certainly…

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Eric Boocock’s BSA C15T All trials riders like to make their machines as light as possible. It stands to reason, the lighter the bike, the easier it is to haul over rocks or out of bogs and the less tiring it will be to ride. But how to go about getting a light bike? Well,…

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Mk2 Royal Enfield Interceptor Arranging a bike for a photo shoot isn’t always the easiest thing in the world, there is the weather, the photographer, the owner and the tester to get in one spot at the same time. If you want to test more than one bike, then the problems increase in proportion to…

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1948 Panther 100 Forget all that nonsense about autocratic engineers and underhand boardroom shenanigans; Joe Public killed the British motorcycle industry. The fact that he kept buying their machines when they were so lamentably underdeveloped and so shoddily produced simply encouraged the manufacturers to keep churning out the same old porridge, with a face-lift here…

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Unusual looking Suzuki Stinger It’s 1966, you are the Suzuki Motorcycle Company and everything in the world is wonderful. You are riding high on Grand Prix successes and your bikes are winning renown worldwide. In fact, in motorcycling terms, the world is your oyster, due in no small part to the meteoric accomplishments of your…

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Norvil 1000 Commando Since the collapse of NVT thirty years ago, the Norton story has been complicated, to say the least. No sooner has the name popped up in one place than it disappears, only to resurface in a different guise eleswhere. Who can forget the Nemesis, that alleged saviour of the British bike industry?…

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2003 Harley-Davidson V-Rod It was love at first sight. There, in a cowshed at the Bristol Classic MotorCycle Show was a Harley-Davidson V-Rod. It looked out of place amid the gleaming Brit iron. I couldn’t take my eyes off it and pushed to the front of the small crowd gathered around the Riders of Bridgewater…

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