The Vintagent Trailers: Speed Is Expensive

SUMMARY

Philip Vincent built the fastest and most glamorous motorcycles in the world – yet he ended his days in poverty. Some 40 years after he died, one of his machines sold for over $1 million. This is his untold story.

Speed is Expensive brings to the screen one of the most dramatic stories in automotive history – the rise and the fall of the Vincent motorcycle. These fast, revolutionary machines were produced by eccentric engineer Philip Vincent and his small team in war-ravaged England. Their bikes took on the world – and often won – gaining more speed records than any other manufacturer during their brief production. In 1955, the firm claimed the ultimate prize: the outright world speed record of 185mph… Yet, just months later, the company pulled out of the motorcycle market. The bikes’ creator, Philip Vincent, never designed another vehicle which would go into production. He died in 1979 – the family fortune exhausted pursuing his obsession with speed. Today, high-profile riders such as Brad Pitt, Ryan Reynolds and Jay Leno revere the bikes. Racing models fetch $1 million at auctions and in private sales.

But Speed is Expensive is more than the story of automotive endeavour. It is also a detective story. The film talks to the men and women who built the bikes; racers, friends and family to learn how Vincent, Phil Irving and his workforce built such revolutionary motorcycles and the secrets behind the bikes’ amazing performance. The film reveals how the fate of the company turned on a high-speed accident on a wind-swept airfield near the factory in the winter of 1947.

This journey of augmented by a rich colour and black and white archive of high-quality film footage shot by Vincent himself, shared by his family, showing his private and professional life from the 1930s onwards. Today, Philip Vincent is seen as nothing short of a genius… the man whose frame designs the Japanese would borrow years later; whose Black Shadow model remained the fastest motorcycle the public could buy right up until the early 1970s. Now, the full story of the pioneer who changed motorcycling forever can be told.

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