Slow Burn: Auctioning the Moto Talbott Collection

It took a blown motorcycle engine to change Nick Smith’s relationship with Robb Talbott from client to friend.  Before the engine incident, Nick (an auction consultant at the time) had worked with Robb either acquiring or dissuading the purchase of machines for the Moto Talbott Collection in Carmel Valley, California. During The Quail Motorcycle Gathering’s (now MotoFest) Quail Ride through the twisting canyons of Carmel Valley, however, Nick was passed at rapid velocity by The Vintagent’s own Paul d’Orleans, busy road testing the Revival Cycles J63 Schwantz Ducati custom.  Like a dog to a rabbit, Nick gave chase to the silver blur, but using full throttle up the long, steep, twisting canyons blew a hole in the crankcase of his 1965 Triumph T120C hot rod.

“Robb stopped and presented me with a first year Talbott Vineyards cork as a plug to block up the hole in the case of my engine,” Nick laughs. “I think that was the moment he transitioned from client to friend. I still have that cork, on the wall, with a photograph of the bike.” Robb’s story and the importance of his motorcycle collection appears elsewhere on The Vintagent, but as Nick explains, “Left to his own devices, he built quite an interesting and entertaining collection and decided to open a museum where he could display these bikes for other people to see them. It was a charitable organization, so all the gate was donated to local charities in northern California.”

‘Was’ – that’s the key word in the last sentence. After a slow decline in the number of visitors through the doors and the desire to simply throw luggage over the back of one of his long-distance machines and ride, in late September 2024, Robb shut the doors to the Moto Talbott Museum. Now, a sizeable number of the 170 machines that made up the collection are for sale and are being offered by Nick’s Classic Avenue online auction site.  Nick says, “We had a continuing discussion about museum attendance being down and the number of people through the door. I said I’ll bet your attendance isn’t down – look at your web traffic – I’ll bet they’re going to the internet. (Robb) has great response to his Instagram, and people are instead sitting on their phones following him and his antics as opposed to physically visiting the collection. It’s a fairly universal museum story these days.”

All of this is a long way from where Nick started, growing up just north of London, ‘playing guitar badly’ as he says, and at 16, riding a Honda CB50J moped before progressively moving up to larger capacity 2-strokes, then 4-strokes, including Kawasaki GPz900s. His father had an Ariel Square 4 and was reluctantly supportive of Nick’s riding habit. Regarding a career, “My guitar teacher at school had a recording studio and I started off there,” Nick says. “I went into that professionally with The Stranglers, Black Sabbath, the Itchy Fingers and a bunch of other bands no one has ever heard of. All I ever wanted to do was work in a recording studio; did it, and hated it.” Meanwhile, many of Nick’s friends were moving to Los Angeles. At 23, he had an accident on his 900 Ninja, the bike got stolen, his job went to crap, and his girlfriend left him. Perhaps worst of all, he had to move back in with his parents. “I jumped into my dad’s car, and California Dreamin’ was on the radio,” Nick says. “I said screw this, I’m going over to the West Coast. I was going to go work in pubs or bars but ended up back in the music business ‘til 2002 when I grew very disillusioned with the industry.”

A chance meeting outside a bar changed the course of his life. “I bumped into the manager of Symbolic Motors in Beverly Hills; we ended up having a beer and I talked my way into a job, and worked there for a year,” Nick explains. He went on to manage Bentley sales in two other California locations before the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009. “I sought solace with a proper job at Bonhams Auctioneers. When they decided they wanted to bump up their motorcycle presence in the U.S. they charged me with the task. They told me, ‘Buy some books, meet some people, it’ll be great.’ And it turned out to be exactly that. Motorcycle camaraderie is a far greater thing than in the car crowd.” Nick headed up the first Bonhams Las Vegas Motorcycle sale in 2011 at the Imperial Palace Hotel and Casino and worked that until moving on to Barrett-Jackson auctions. There, he marketed exotic European cars before, in 2019, deciding self-employment was the way forward. He says, “I was still getting phone calls about motorcycles, and to this day, I’m still in the fortunate position to have never made a call for business, it just keeps coming – we started Classic Avenue, an online auction platform for motorcycles, and it’s been great.”

Nick doesn’t collect motorcycles himself but does have the first Triumph Speed Triple he bought in California when he returned to riding. He also has his “Swiss Army Knife” Tiger 800, plus that (now repaired) 1965 Triumph T120C, and a dirt bike for fun. “I’m not a collector, I’m a dealer,” he says. “I don’t have the time, the money or the space to keep everything.” So who IS collecting motorcycles? Nick doesn’t believe it’s young people. “Kids today, they don’t collect quite like we [older folks] collect. They have one, then they sell it, and then they buy another one. They might have two things, but they’re very sensibly pieced together. Contrast that to the number of times I’ve seen collections of all 1960s Triumphs in each color, or first year Honda CB750s, in all three colors. The kids don’t have that mentality, and they don’t do that. I have a small wall of vinyl albums and CDs that I never play, and my son has a bigger collection of music than I ever had and it’s all on his phone. It’s a different take on what we recognize.”

Nick is not alone in thinking the younger generation prefers to ‘experience’ things. Rather than walk around a museum and only see motorcycles collected in static condition, he says, “They’d rather get on them and go for a spin, which I can’t find fault in. But it’s causing a shift. For Robb, the collection was working him, rather than him working the collection, and so he decided to close. He’ll whittle the 170 bikes down to 20 or 25 he’ll keep, put them in a converted carriage house, and share them with family and friends over wine and cigars.”

To sell that number of machines from Robb’s collection, Nick says, “We could have gone to a brick-and-mortar auction, but there you’ve got one day – blow ‘em out and done – which has its appeal. But, if you want the slower burn, I can get reasonable prices, but I can’t do it particularly quickly. We do seven-day auctions, six to nine bikes a week, and if they don’t meet reserve I work with high bidders the good old-fashioned way. I’m not into the quick burn of it. When I was at Bonhams we sold 250 bikes in a day, it was very stressful, very fun, but you’ve only three minutes on stage [per bike]. I’m giving them seven days, and I’m available to anybody who wishes to talk to me about any of the bikes, and they’ll get an honest answer.”

There’s very much a European bent to the Moto Talbott Collection. Numerous Italian machines, plenty of Japanese off-road motorcycles, and more. Many of the bikes have patina, resplendent in original paint with the scars and scuffs that help tell a story. The motorcycles Robb acquired were, for the most part, bought at auction or from other collections and were usually in static condition. “Maybe some work was done, maybe not, and I’m not prepared to sell a motorcycle that I can’t answer the questions,” Nick continues. “We’re doing a preliminary recommissioning to confirm the basics such as spark at one end and fuel supply at the other and that there are internals. These aren’t full recommissions, just basic, just to make sure the bike is as described and not falling apart or missing internal parts – they will need more fettling to return them to the road.”

The market right now, Nick says, “Is so bizarre. Looking at the results from the 2025 Mecum sale, nothing makes sense. It’s completely unpredictable. The very top of the market and the very bottom of the market are quite predictable. You can sell junk, and you can sell exquisite one-off stuff. But when you get down to the middle market, nothing makes sense. I sold two similar bikes at Mecum: one was much nicer and sold on a much better day, and it achieved 10 percent less than a rattier one sold on a bad day. And British is soft. I attribute that to the fact they’re not reliable [see paragraph 1 – ed.]. And the kids can’t relate, because they didn’t grow up with unreliability. Even British cars are-  for the first time I’ve seen – seemingly going the same way, decreasing in value.” Japanese bikes of the 1980s are spiking and that led to a spate of collecting Suzuki Katanas and Kawasaki Ninjas. But Nick says unless a machine like that has ownership history and low miles, the value isn’t there as, “they simply made too many of them.”

 

Interested in the bikes of the Talbott Museum collection? Head over to ClassicAvenue.com, visit MotoTalbott.com, or follow along on Instagram: Nick’s is @classicavenuemotoring.com and Robb’s @mototalbott.