Top Ten Bikes at Mecum 2024

Motorcycles, how do we love thee?  Well, thousands of us are willing to sit in an indoor rodeo arena in Las Vegas for days, listening to the drone of a professional cattle auctioneer’s callout as hundreds of motorcycles pass under the hammer every day.  2024 is another banner year for Mecum’s Las Vegas mega-auction, with over 1400 motorcycles ready to roll across the auction podium at the South Point Hotel and Casino, with the action commencing at 9am Wed Jan 24, and running till about 4pm on Saturday Jan 27.  The amazing variety of motorcycles on offer come from individual sellers, professional restorers, and this year from a record 18 special collections, ranging from John Goldman’s superb Museo Moto Italia collection to the Classic Motorcycles Austria collection to the Bud Ekins Family Trust.

The Vintagent team has selected their Mecum Top Ten for 2024 from the rabbit hole that is the entirety of Mecum’s four-day list.  We invite you to have a look for yourself, and if there’s anything we missed that you think should be included, feel free to add it to the comments below, along with why it floats your boat.  The following bikes float our boat, filling a variety of different neurotransmitter receptors, from funky and original, to awesomely historic, to groovy one-offs.  Enjoy!

1957 F.B. Mondial 250 Bialbero

If you were looking for the ultimate collector motorcycle, look no further, as this extraordinary 1957 Mondial 250cc Bialbero Grand Prix has it all: amazing good looks, apex technical sophistication and innovation, and World Championship podium status.  It is extraordinarily rare and probably unique, as part of the Mondial factory collection that was dispersed following their closure in 1977.  F.B. Mondial won a trifecta of World Championships from 1949-51 in the 125cc class, then officially took a break from Grand Prix competition to concentrate on developing their road motorcycle business.  The factory still sold Monoalbero racers to selected clients, and quietly developed them while biding their time to return to GP racing with a new model.  In late 1956 they revealed an entirely new DOHC single-cylinder racer with a 6-speed gearbox, using a shaft-and-bevel drive for the cams rather than their usual train of gears.  With engine number 250-1, this machine is most likely the very first of these factory racers, built in 1956 and raced exclusively by factory rider Tarquinio Provini during the 1957 season.  This is most likely the very machine Provini raced to 2^nd place in the 1957 World Grand Prix Championship, and on which he won the 1957 Italian National Championship.  During 1957, the factory revised the engine for their 250 DOHC racers, returning to a tower of gears driving the camshafts, which Provini did not race. Of the both types of 250 Grand Prix racers from 1956/7, it is believed only seven machines total were built, and this is the only shaft-and-bevel 250 Mondial racer in the world.

This exquisite machine deservedly won Best of Show at the 2017 Quail Motorcycle Gathering, and was included in the 2023 Taschen reference book ‘Ultimate Collector Motorcycles’, by Charlotte and Peter Fiell.   And this factory 1957 Mondial 250cc Bialbero Grand Prix certainly qualifies, being unique, storied, and devastatingly beautiful.

1938 Brough Superior SS100 with Sidecar

Barn find SS100s are incredibly rare these days, so this 1938 MX-engined SS100 is exciting: it’s a known machine in the Brough club, was last registered in England in 1967, and looks to be in original paint condition, with enough patina to suggest it is unmolested and original.  Plus, it comes with a a rare Launch sidecar from the Brough Superior catalog, with the famous ‘petrol tube’ chassis George Brough invented.

George Brough earned eternal fame with his Brough Superiors, especially the SS100 model, which was his masterpiece.  When introduced in 1924, the ‘Hundred’ was the most beautiful, most expensive, fastest, and most coveted motorcycle in the world, and so it remains to this day.  While George was a master of PR, he was also a master stylist, and every motorcycle to emerge from his small Nottingham workshop was guaranteed to be as gorgeous as it was eminently functional.  His machines worked; they were built for fast touring (and racing, if you ordered it so) with ‘special for Brough’ extra-durable materials inside their engines and gearboxes, which he famously strong-armed out of his suppliers, who it must be acknowledged benefitted equally from the association.  In the mid-1930s, George Brough sourced his SS80 and SS100 engines from AMC, with their ‘MX’ sidevalve and overhead valve engines. The MX-engine secured the Brough Superior SS100’s status as the world’s premier luxury motorcycle on its introduction in 1934, having become an ultra-sophisticated grand tourer of peerless styling and a first-class finish, a money-no-object motorcycle for the very rich. Which perfectly defines the SS100’s place in motorcycling today, and while the cost of ownership has grown exponentially, the description when new remains the same.  Broughs never languished as inexpensive or disposable, and their coveted status among collectors means a high percentage of the 3048 Brough Superiors built have survived.

1922 Tavener Twin

You like rare?  How about unique!  This fascinating special has a known history as one man’s vision of the perfect motorcycle, and in truth it’s pretty cool. In the ‘Teens and Twenties, discussion raged in the motorcycling press regarding ‘the ideal motorcycle’.  Ernest Tavener, a 19-year old apprentice in the Rolls Royce aircraft division, put the metal where his mouth was in 1921, making his own ideal motorcycle, which he naturally dubbed the Tavener.  The specification was intriguing, and included an M.A.G. (Motosacoche) 1000cc V-twin engine paired with a single-speed belt drive and clutch.  The Motosacoche engine was considered the finest-built motorcycle engine one could buy off the shelf, with typical Swiss characteristics: perfect castings and build quality, solid specification with a sporting edge: not the fastest motor available but much less nervous than a comparable sporting J.A.P. V-twin.  So far so good: where the Tavener gets interesting is the chassis, which is clearly what Ernest had ideas about.   The frame is built entirely of straight tubing for maximum strength, and bolted together without welds or heavy cast lugs.  The steering head is a piece of stout large-diameter tubing, to which all forward frame tubes are bolted.  The engine and gearbox are mounted in flat plats and flat straps, also bolted together.  The rear frame section runs wide of the rear wheel, which is actually carried in an independent, leaf-sprung subframe built of sheet steel.  The front forks are the most elaborate part of the chassis, with a triple girder fork mounting the front wheel on a leading-link axle, which moves via a lever to a flat leaf spring mounted alongside the deeply valanced front fender.  The rear fender is similarly deeply valanced, 20 years before Briggs Weaver redesigned the Indian motocycle lineup along similar lines.

In 1926 the Tavener was modified to include a 3-speed Sturmey-Archer gearbox and clutch.  In the 1980s the Taverner was restored for the road, which is the state in which it sits today as an older restoration of a fascinating and unique motorcycle with excellent lines and innovative chassis design.  With a stout frame, leaf springing front and rear, and attractive bodywork, the Tavener remains a remarkably appealing motorcycle.

1941 Gilera LTE

If you’re a military motorcycle buff, you’ve seen all the WLAs, M20s, and R75Ms you need in your life, but you’ve probably never seen a Gilera LTE in full military spec before.   And it’s a beauty, with full suspension front and rear in typical 1930s Italian style, and exquisite castings and build quality.  Gilera was the sharp edge of future racing technology in the 30s with their supercharged DOHC four-cyliner Rondine racer, but they also offered more humble but beautifully made motorcycles for the public, like the Saturno hotrod single, and the LTE, with its 500cc sidevalve engine.

The LTE was characterized by an unusual rear suspension system provided by a triangulated tubular swingarm connected to horizontal spring boxes mounted high in the frame, with a hand-adjustable friction damper.  The forks were standard girders, and the gearbox a 4-speed with hand shifter.  With its 500cc sidevalve motor, the LTE was a lovely machine, and was lighter and more sophisticated than its rivals.  This 1941 Gilera LTE is a very rare machine, and in superb, fully operational condition.

1953 Harley-Davidson Model KK

This ultra-rare, low-mileage 1953 Harley-Davidson Model KK is a one-year-only model and a factory Hot Rod. The odometer reads a believable 6,500 miles, and as a first-generation K model has a 45 CI (750cc) sidevalve V-twin motor that was revolutionary in the Harley-Davidson lineup. It was the first Harley-Davidson with both hydraulic telescopic forks and hydraulic shock rear suspension and was their first unit-construction V-twin.