July 2009: the fashion world was abuzz with two leaked photos (by Stéphane Feugére) of a custom-built 'Chanel Triton' being photographed for use as a prop for a Chanel photo shoot. Staff explained the photos were for their 2010 Spring collection, 'Starting Point', during the shoot on the Rue Royale Chanel boutique in Paris, during Fashion Week. The photos were no surprise to The Vintagent, as we'd watched the bike come together during the year, and were curious how this beautiful problem child would be received by the world.
While delivered to the address indicated, the package was refused - 'return to sender' [Benoit Guerry]While vintage motorcycles are regularly used to give high-fashion advertising a cachet of authenticity, nostalgia, and bad-boy chic, the Chanel-branded Triton was a different animal; a contemporary custom covered in the company's logo. The houses of haute couture typically use motorcycles as an anonymous prop, but the Triton was Chanel all over, from the cutout logo on the exhaust heat shield, to smaller details like 'double C' gas caps and fork seal retaining rings, which were shaped to mimic the current crop of Chanel watch bezels, while the speedo itself was rebuilt to as a Chanel watch. The address of Coco Chanel's apartment, 31 Rue Cambon, is emblazoned on the Featherbed frame (surrounded by a 'midnight-with-starry-sky' paint job) - a reference as well to the new Chanel magazine of that name. 'Chanel' even replaced 'Triumph' on the engine cases!
Karl Lagerfeld, Baptiste Giacobini, and Lara Stone on the set of 'Vol du Jour'
Models Lara Stone and Baptiste Giacobini were draped over the bike, and the Triton wasn't merely used for a photo shoot; Karl Lagerfeld, the infamous Creative Director of Chanel, featured the Triton as the principal prop of his latest film - 'Vol du Jour' (the film is nonfunctional on the Chanel website, watch it below). In the film, Stone and Giacobini shoplift clothing from various Chanel shops in Paris, and escape by stealing the Triton! A plotline with a sense of humor...but Karl should definitely keep his day job, as his films aren't nearly as polished as his clothing, or his image.
The Triton was built as a collaboration between several French creatives: Daniel Delfour (builder of the Norton Alla'Verde hybrid, and a violin maker by trade), Vincent Prat (Wheels&Waves founder), and Frank Charriaut (an original Southsider, and former Chanel designer...which may have something to do with the Triton...), with paint by Momo. It was also born into trouble, being built without the the permission or knowledge of Chanel themselves. While Karl Lagerfeld loved the Triton, and rented it for Chanel's advertising and his own film that year, lawyers representing the firm insisted all identifying logos be removed from the machine. The raison d'etre of the exercise thus defeated, the Chanel Triton was then completely dismantled, having been built for a purpose. Its parts were scattered to serve other projects, and it exists today only as photographs and a short film, an avant garde alt.custom before its time, that was appreciated by creatives, but destroyed by lawyers. Handkerchief, please.
A stunt rider, and nominal 'owner' of the Triton, on the set of 'Vol du Jour'An homage or a theft of intellectual property? The Chanel Triton.The Chanel Triton as it appeared in the company's print advertisingThe offending parts of the machine, bearing the company's logos
The exhaust heat shield - a bold statement! [Benoit Guerry]Such a shame; it was a beautiful motorcycle [Benoit Guerry]
He was a 'grey man' in a suit, an ordinary worker, never missing a day in his job as an inventory clerk at the Seimens-Albis factory in Zurich, Switzerland. By all accounts, Karlheinz Weinberger was unassuming, quiet, kept to himself, and was a loyal employee. But in the evenings and on weekends, this self-taught photographer stalked the 'dark' places of the Swiss psyche, working under the pseudonym 'Jim' as a member of the gay beefcake photography club 'Der Kreis' in the early 1950s. If our story ended there, he would probably be forgotten as just another closeted gay man in squeaky-clean Switzerland.
Around 1958, he insinuated himself into a totally different 'scene' of young rebels and bikers, who squirmed under the thumb of Conformity, and grasped at the crack in the universe which was Elvis Presley, James Dean, rock music, and motorcycles... just like kids in the rest of the world! These youngsters (dubbed 'Halbstark' - half-strong - by Swiss media) home-grew a flamboyant style, which veered away from the American 'rebel' dress code of blue jeans, t-shirts, and boots. They wore belt buckles the size of hubcaps, with crudely chased images of skulls, Elvis, or Gene Vincent, favoring oversize artillery shells, animal skins, and horseshoes as necklaces. They wore cowboy boots with heels rather than engineer's boots. Better still, addressing the very source of Teen energy, they tore out the zippers of their blue jeans and replaced them with bolts, chains, or barbed wire, in an almost Medieval display of crotchery.
The Halbstark shaped a fiercely independent identity in their small, close-knit culture, and evolved in relative isolation, away from the prying eyes of the international press. After all, how many Swiss rock bands 'broke out' in 1958? Or ever? What part of Cool ever came from Zurich? The members of these gangs were 'Nowhere' and they knew it, but created their own life raft via subculture of fashion identity.
By the mid-1960s, the Swiss media began to take note of this homegrown oddity, and Karlheinz Weinberger's photographs of the gangs were published for the first time. He remained loyally embedded with his friends over the years, documenting their dissipation as the 60s wore into the 70s, and the era's corrosive elements began to take their toll.
In the last 7 years of his life, Weinberger was transformed from an obscure photographer to a celebrated cultural chronicler of a fascinating, lost subculture. In 1999 the first book of his photos was published - 'Karlheinz Weinberger' (Andrea Zust Verlag, Binder/Meyer/Jaegi authors), which is long out of print, and is now a collector's item. Before and after his death, Weinberger was featured in numerous exhibitions around the world, and his photographs are in the collections of major museums. He was born in 1921 and lived most of his life in obscurity, but when he died in 2006, he was a famous artist.
During the 1950s and early 60s, other pioneering artists working with motorcycle gangs as subject matter (Danny Lyon, Kenneth Anger, etc) produced rich and fascinating bodies of work with very similar themes. Let's call it the Zeitgeist of the 50s, which led these photographers and filmmakers into some interesting territory. A branch of Motorcycling evolved in the 1950s that was self-consciously 'antisocial', and brandishing imagery that was highly charged, threatening, or just plain offensive. They mined cultural turf that was anxiously avoided by 'straight' society (homoeroticism, fascist symbols, sadomasochistic hardware, blasphemous language). Motorcycles, symbolizing independence, fearlessness, and fun, became the perfect accessory for individuals who just didn't jibe with how they were 'supposed to be', as the rest of society (mostly, their parents!) desperately grasped for a period of normalcy after the horrors of global War and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
While the numbers of 'rebels on motorcycles' were relatively small in the US, Britain, and Europe, their powerful imagery stained the public's perception of Motorcycling for decades. Films about motorcycles during the 50s through 70s almost always featured violent gangs of ignorant thugs, with a few bright exceptions like 'On Any Sunday'. It took the concerted efforts of Soichiro Honda and his advertising team to shine a light back on Motorcycling as a fun pastime, allowing just regular folks to approach 'two wheels' without stigma for the first time since the 1930s. But damn, those thugs looked cool.
What explains an addiction to old motorcycles? They’re costly, dirty, noisy, not always reliable, but something keeps bringing us back for another hit. But what?
Sometime George Formby impersonator Graeme Hardy here with his pre-war AJS
Well, they’re just great fun to ride. They’re involving. On an old bike you see, hear, even smell the cycle working beneath you. In an age of diagnostic servicing and electronic driver aids, they ask something of the rider; sometimes they ask a lot. But an older bike – running nicely, running fast – is a credit to its pilot-mechanic, not a computer. There’s also the appeal, for many of us, of riding back in time – older bikes have lived through history we can only read about. Doing so at pre-war venues such as the Montlhéry autodrome and the Brooklands speed bowl is a thrilling exercise in riding with ghosts; fast ones.
The article's author David Lancaster chats with the owner of a pre-war Triumph Tiger 100 with a McCandless swingarm conversion, invented before the Rex and Cromie McCandless designed the Norton Featherbed frame.
Kop Hill, in rural Buckinghamshire, has a history as rich as those historic venues, and it too has a lineage back to the pioneer era. The hill itself runs for just over a two-thirds of a mile, snaking gently into the English countryside with subtle turns on the way up. From 1910 until 1925 the Kop Hill speed trial was one of the country’s major motoring and motorcycling events, home to fierce competition between top riders and drivers of the day. These included the likes of Malcolm Campbell in his Talbot Blue Bird and Count Zborowski in his eight-cylinder Ballot.
Morgan Aero lined up for the off!
Fastest of all was Freddie Dixon, who in 1925 on a 736cc Douglas set the outright record for two or four wheels by taking the timed section of the climb in just over 22 seconds, at a remarkable 81mph average. This, over a stretch of ‘road’ which was mostly loose gravel back then, bumpy and with a one-in-five climb at its steepest point, was a high velocity swan-song for the original event.
The King of Sprinters - a Douglas SW5. These were kings of the Speedway in the 1920s, and today they still acquit themselves well in sprints. The engine was developed by Freddie Dixon, while employed by Douglas in the mid-1920s
It has another claim to history, too. When in 1925 a spectator (who had been warned about standing too close to the action) was hit by a competitor’s car, the road-safety and political classes increased their opposition to motorsport events taking place on public roads, even if closed to traffic. The British establishment has been called a ‘committee which never meets’ and soon its various arms - by then including the governing bodies the Auto-Cycle Union and Royal Automobile Club - closed ranks and stopped all competitive riding or driving in the UK outside of purpose-built circuits like Brooklands.
Slightly faster than the usual; a 1920s Neracar with Blackburne motor replacing the usual gutless two-stroke
Kop Hill’s closure in 1925 was a victory for a vocal anti-motorsport lobby in the UK. The Isle of Man TT races were established in 1907 because the Manx government took a more indulgent attitude towards racing than the rest of the UK. And the famous British racing green of pre-war Bentleys, and later Jaguars and Aston Martins, owes its adoption to mainland drivers and team managers racing in Ireland. The famous Gordon Bennett Cup had moved there as early as 1903, leading the local paper the Leinster Leader to note excitedly that Ireland would be ‘the battle-ground on which to decide the supremacy of the latest inventions to revolutionize locomotion.’ British lawmakers looked the other way and British teams took on the green of Ireland as an act of thanks, tribute and rebellion.
A 'Teens ABC Skootamota paddock bike; one of the original scooters, and possible inventor of the 'scooter' name, sort of
Since 2009, local enthusiasts have staged runs up the original Kop Hill for a cadre of mostly pre-1950 cars and bikes, with the numbers and quality of the vehicles increasing every year. Demonstration runs, of course, but amongst the open tourers with children nestled in the back (one was spotted happily asleep in an Alvis as the car headed off the start line), several hit high speeds from properly brisk take-offs. Unlike the short, sharp ascent of Brooklands’ Test Hill, here riders and drivers can charge through gearboxes and navigate the narrow lane, building speed all the time. The big shots turn out too: from the modest grandstand or watching from feet away along the length of the hill, spectators can see, hear and breathe-in Bentleys, Rolls Royces, Bugattis, Brough Superiors, Rudges, Vincents-HRDs gunning up a hill which is both longer and – should you wish – faster than you expect.
Proceeds from the two days of the September weekend go to the Heart of Bucks Community Foundation and since 2009 over £400,000 has been distributed to local charities. It’s all rather wonderfully British: a little chaotic at times, polite, run by dedicated amateurs. But it has an air of informality and stubborn democracy, in contrast to more rigidly organized events. As a result, Kop Hill retains a perfume of authenticity, redolent of the Century-ago pioneers of competitive motor-sport.
Wonderful irony - waiting for The Sun to come outThe Excelsior Manxman is an all-time lovely racing motorcycleAlways nice to see a Brough Superior SS100 in use; this is a late '30s version, with the AMC ohv v-twin motorRex-Acme, another long forgotten name, but a force in the 1920s, using Blackburne engines like this machineRichard Scudder checks the spark plug on his 1938 Vincent-HRD Rapide Series A twinThe last of a early 'cammy' Velocettes, a Mk1 KSS racer, ca.1933
Some 20-odd years ago, whilst browsing a Junk Shop in Greenwich (southeast London), I found a very scruffy suitcase gathering dust, filled with a pile of old newspapers. Closer inspection revealed some interesting stuff, including a mountain of photographs of pre-WW2 Speedway racing – a particular passion of mine! That set the heart racing; without wanting to appear too eager for fear of escalating the price, the obvious question was asked - “How much for this old suitcase full of Newspapers?”. The welcome retort was “Give us a fiver!”
Putt Mossman doing the 'ladder trick' aboard his Indian 4 - dig those crazy exhaust pipes!
My anticipation was agonizing during the drive home, as there was no way to properly assess the contents of my prize until they could be spread out and sifted through. That humble suitcase revealed a treasure trove of material related to just one man; Frederick Lindop Evans. Fred Evans was the Manager of Hackney Wick Speedway team, and it quickly became clear that the case contained personal effects from his time as Hackney ‘Wolves’ Manager, covering the period 1935 until the outbreak of the 1939-1945 conflict in Europe. Fred Evans survived the War, but apparently he was never reunited with his treasured possessions, which remains a complete mystery. To relate Fred’s story and explore the entire contents of the suitcase is beyond the scope of this post, but after years of dipping in and out of the thousands of items, many stories emerge.
Putt Mossman demonstrating his broadsliding technique, leg-trailing in 1920s style, aboard a JAP Speedway racer
And this is where Oren 'Putt' Mossman comes into the story. Putt was born in Iowa, USA in 1906, and traveled the world as a stunt rider, midget car racer, boxer, actor, and all around carny and showman. Fred Evans was great friends with Putt! During these Pre-War years, Speedway in England was big; indeed for a while, it was Britain’s top spectator sport. Fred and Putt shared much in common. The most significant pattern to emerge is a shared obsession with ‘Self Publicity’. As well as the obvious Speedway connection, they both loved to play Golf and as it happened, Fred was a member the exclusive Chorleywood Golf Club in Middlesex. From Fred’s diaries it seems that whenever Putt was in London, they tried to fit a game in at least once a week. Given that Fred and his Hackney Team were touring the Country at least 5 nights a week, where they found the time is beyond belief, as Putt’s schedule was probably just as hectic!
Putt Mossman and acrobatic partners atop a mid-1930s Indian Four
On occasions their schedules didn’t work out - see the note from Putt, with his wonderful Letter Headed paper proclaiming his achievements - saying sorry that golf would not be possible on July 17, 1938. Both appear to have been accomplished Practical Jokers, if examples of the outrageous tricks they played one another and on the Hackney Riders are anything to go by! Showman Putt needed an opportunity to present his exploits to big audiences, and it seems that our Fred was also keen to make the most of the large attendances at Hackney by adding new attractions to his Speedway meetings. The synergy was obvious and Putt’s Stunt Show fitted the bill perfectly for the intervals. The Hackney Wick crowd was already huge, but the added attractions swelled the gate, giving a mutual benefit to both parties. Putt of course would go on to spend a great deal of time in England, and his schedule of shows defies logic. My god, he must have had some stamina!
Putt Mossman's schedule was packed with shows - he was a busy man and knew how to 'make hay while the sun shines!'
A quick glance at the attached Press Cutting (above) will show how he managed to pack in more than 11 shows across the country in just 13 days - it is said that he once did 100 shows in England in just one year. Given his propensity to push himself to the limit and beyond, he had terrific self-confidence, not allowing himself the luxury of a few days recovery should he tumble (and tumble he did it appears, on many occasions!).
The 1936 Hackney Wick speedway program, with the Putt Mossman sideshow
As well as the Stunt Shows, Putt was a Speedway rider of some note, and appeared with the American team on a regular basis. A photograph of the Tram outside the famous Hackney Empire Music Hall and Theatre, clearly expresses the sentiment that ‘It pays to advertise’. Wonderfully evocative of pre-war London, it encapsulates the Mossman/Evans connection via a banner promoting an American Speedway Team vs. Hackney Wick match. The photo of Putt in full ‘Leg Trailing’ mode not only demonstrates his skill as an accomplished Speedway rider, but shows him casually wearing a pullover and a tie!
During one of his many visits to Britain, Putt participated in the 1938 Isle of Man Lightweight TT, on an OK Supreme. Sadly, he did not finish, falling at the 33rd Milestone and suffering a serious arm injury. As if to wear his failure as a glorious Badge of Office, he printed up the Post Card below, which, like so many of the others found in the case, is personally signed by Putt to Fred Evans.
Incidentally, whilst on the subject of the Isle of Man, it is a little known fact that Putt also did the Stunt Riding for the iconic film ‘No Limit’ that starred George Formby as a TT Rider which was actually shot in the I.O.M in 1935. Among his stunts, perhaps one of the most dramatic was staged at the Hackney Wick Stadium. A makeshift scaffold was erected, and a ramp descended from the top of the Grandstand, sweeping down to a take-off ramp, where Putt was propelled though the air to land in 15” deep pool of water. As if this feat was not daring enough, the pool of water was topped off with burning petrol! Although the leap was a spectacular success from the crowd’s perspective, personal recollections of a spectator reveals that a heavy landing resulted in a broken and bloody nose for Putt. In true showman’s spirit, he completely disregarded his injuries, picked himself up, and rode a lap of honour, to the great acclaim of the assembled masses.
Although well known for his Ladder Walk, the top photo in this article, which has been published on several occasions I believe, is again rather special as it is personally signed and dedicated ‘To my good friend & Pal, Fred’. The bike incidentally, is an Indian 4-cylinder job, with an amazing exhaust system! It was an expensive machine then; I wonder where it is now? These images are a small selection of the treasures associated with Putt that came from this wonderful goldmine of Pre-War Speedway ephemera. Stunt Riding was effectively a ‘Part Time’ job for him; amongst other things, Putt was, or had been, a Speedway Champion [Japan 1936] a Champion Shoe Thrower [Horseshoes], Midget Car Racer, Boxer, Baseball Player and Vaudeville artist. His public swan song was an appearance on the Johnny Carson Show, pitching horseshoes between Johnny's legs! What a man.
Putt Mossman beign dragged by his Indian 4Putt on his chrome-tank Indian 4; note the clown behind him, who can be seen in the short film of Putt's performance, trick-riding a small 2-stroke motorcycleThis London tram has a Hackney Wick show banner, which features Putt Mossman prominently
Rin Tanaka has outdone himself. The master of books on vintage clothing has published the definitive history of American motorcycle gear, 'Harley-Davidson Book of Fashions: 1910s - 1950s', after he was given rare access to the Harley-Davidson Museum and Archives, with their over 100,000 photographs spanning their entire history from 1903 to the present. H-D was one of the first motorcycle manufacturers to hire professional photographers to document their progress, and kept photographic and documentary records of their various lines of accessories which they offered from 1914, along with the entire run of The Enthusiast magazine and contributions from various dealers, clubs, and race promoters.
One doesn't really think of 'Fashions' per se when the name Harley-Davidson comes up, but Tanaka makes a compelling case that their extensive line of Motor Clothing, produced for the last 90-odd years, has made a sartorial impact far beyond those who simply ride H-D motorcycles. The book, which is large format (11" x 14") and beautifully printed, moves between official publications / catalog photos, and shots of contemporary riders actually using the purpose-designed clothing and accessories in races, club events, official business, and the military. Each chapter focuses on a decade (1910s, 20s, etc), and shows the evolution of 'gear' as motorcycling itself changed and conditions demanded new and better products. He also explores how customization of clothing (and by implication, the bikes too) developed from various small accessories into the blaze of custom culture in which we now live.
The 600 photographs are luscious and beautifully reproduced, and lots of surprises turn up, such as this 'Harley' Board Track racer which uses a Cyclone engine with one cylinder blanked off! The photographs are gorgeous, and Tanaka has chosen mostly never-seen shots from the Archives. Tanaka knows his vintage motorcycle gear history, and has the eye of a designer laying out the book. The copious images are clearly the point of the book, and the text is minimal - there are times when a bit more exposition would be welcome, but in truth I imagine that few people have a total grasp over the enormity of the Archive and all the details represented. The first edition print run was 10,000 copies - huge by motorcycle book standards, but with H-D attached to the project, I imagine this book will require further print runs.
Sometimes a scoop is a whispered favor; sometimes you grab it with both hands and run. I had the great luxury of spending a weekend in the company of the Falcon Motorcycles team; the Bullet, the Kestrel, Ian and Amaryllis, a talented trio of fabricators from Falcon, and Leif who built up the engine, at the Quail Lodge for the Motorcycle Gathering. I've had the rare opportunity not only of having (well, hijacking) the first real ride on the Kestrel, but of watching the entire process of its development from a sketch through 'wouldn't these parts look cool if I mated them this way' to firing up the bike and easing the clutch home.
Paul d'Orléans aboard the Falcon Kestrel at the Quail Motorcycle Gathering. [Amaryllis Knight]And what a thing Ian Barry has created. It has broken the bounds of 'Custom' into some new category. Ian Barry is no longer a Custom builder, he's graduated to a motorcycle designer, and the Kestrel is his masterpiece.
When I first saw the Bullet while judging at the 2008 Legends, I thought it was a well-executed Custom, worthy of praise, and thus tolerable to a Vintagent who had little interest in the genre per se, but certainly an appreciation of good workmanship and passion. The Kestrel is different. Ian Barry has shown there is Vintage blood running in his veins, plus something else, but I'll let history name that. Mark my words, it will. I'll stake a claim here and now that the Kestrel has broken out of the Custom shell, and has become something completely new. This man and his team made a Motorcycle the world will have to reckon with.
The Kestrel is low and sleek, and an ultra-refined Bob Job, although none was ever built like this. [Paul d'Orléans]I was interviewed last week for Wired magazine about the new Brough Superior project, the technical issues to overcome when building a contemporary motorcycle from an old design. We spoke at length about modern materials and old skills required to make an air-cooled engine with limited lubrication run well and durably. I mentioned the ethos of George Brough, which was to build a 'money is no object' motorcycle to his exacting standards, and how the new Brough Superior is built to such a standard. The reporter asked if any other manufacturers used this credo today. I had to think hard, as of course, no production motorcycle can be built to such standards with any hope of financial survival.
The quality of contruction is superb, but the quality of the design is simply on another level. Most fabricators seek expedience and expect the simplicity of a solution to be beautiful, but Ian Barry sought beauty from the design itself. [Paul d'Orléans]The only people with the dedication to build completely over-the-top motorcycles in terms of labor cost are making Customs these days. Not the bolt-up or raked-out variety, but the true artisans who spend countless hours pursuing their unique vision of what a motorcycle can be. Kimura, Nogata, Barry, and a handful of others. The outer form may be similar to other machines; the great qualitative difference is Time. No shortcut in machining or bolting on a stock part can replace hundreds or thousands of hours of skilled handwork. It's a difficult path to walk, and there's no guarantee that even those established in this rarified air can remain there indefinitely, as economic realities, like the weather, are not subject to our will or wishes.
An intriguing cut-away primary cover reveals the robust clutch and add a racy line. [Paul d'Orléans]Having had the great luxury of observing the Kestrel's full spectrum of development from idea to metal, I 'knew what to expect' when the machine was finally unveiled. And when I saw the post-painting photos, I thought it very well done indeed, but was hoping for a little more flash. After all, it was supposed to be a Custom.
Falcon Motorcycle's designer Ian Barry after the Quail Motorcycle Gathering. [Paul d'Orléans]That statement may come as a bit of a shock to my friends at Falcon, but I hope they understand. I've made a point in the last 35 years to own the motorcycles I thought were the most beautiful in the world, and my standards are high; four Broughs, and a lot of racing bikes - Nortons (Manx, Inters, flat-tankers, twins), Velocettes (KTTs from '29-'49, Thruxtons et al), Sunbeams (TT90, Longstroke), Scotts (ex-Works '29 TT), BMW (R63, R68, R69, R51racer), Rudge ('29 Ulster). A supercharged Zenith for cryin' out loud...something like 300 bikes passed through my garage in that period. What I couldn't find or afford, I borrowed rides on, some of which I've been privileged to share via The Vintagent's Road Test series.
So I spent more time with the Kestrel, and each time I looked I found something new. A funny little gearbox adjuster, with positive stops and a brace to prevent any axial play. An internal throttle which exits through the end of the clip-on handlebar, with a knurled cable adjuster fixed unobtrusively in place. The little locking levers on top of the TT carbs, which adjust the idle speed. The brackets which hold the two pannier tanks together, which are...turnbuckles... and adjustable to be sure the tanks will fit together just so. An articulated shifter mechanism which mimics the fine bones of the inner ear. And gradually, I was awe-struck.
The Kestrel isn't a first-look or a ten-foot motorcycle, it's a third look machine, or a fifth. Like a work of fine art, it needs to be lived with to soak it in. It rewards time with time, those thousands of hours spent on its creation slowly leak back out, if you let them. It's a monumental achievement, and among the most beautiful two-wheelers ever made.
Perhaps the best angle to appreciate the sweet wholeness of the Kestrel. [Paul d'Orléans]Stick it on a shelf with a 1926 SS100, the blown AJS ohc twin, the NSU Rennmax, the icons, the great ones. If I were a wealthy man, I would buy the next Falcon. As it is, we'll just have to wait and see how the Vincent 'Black' Falcon turns out. Ian may make better machines in the future, or lesser, but we have the Kestrel, and it is the new standard. OK, enough love poem, clearly I'm smitten. I was also the first person to RIDE the Kestrel for any distance, as it was finished a day before the Quail with many, many sleepless nights spent fabricating the pieces in the previous months. The 'World Exclusive' etc wasn't my intention, I simply found myself having been granted permission to try the Kestrel, with a running engine between my legs, and an open lawn. 'First gear is really tall' is all Ian said, but I knew the clutch was built for triple the horsepower, so a little slippage wouldn't harm things. As I blatted the throttle and a glorious rasp barked from the two-into-one open megaphone (hand shaped by Ian into a fish mouth), it occurred to me that a ride around the golf course, fun as that sounds, wouldn't tell me what I needed to Know.
Does it work? Or like Mona Lisa, is it a lovely work of Art? I had reconnoitered the field access a bit earlier by riding my late-entry (ie, no entry, and at noon) '28 Sunbeam TT90 from the street onto the lawn, and thank you Courtney Porras for telling Quail security that I could 'do whatever I want'. Give a man an inch! Thus I knew it was perfectly possible to ride the bike straight from the grass to the road, and nobody would stop me. Up the grassy slope - road clear - and off I went, first right, to all smiles from the hundreds of motorcyclists parked up along the street, and back again to the left, where the highway beckoned.
Integrated brake lever pivots within the handlebar... [Paul d'Orléans]The private drive of the Quail is a couple of miles long, and has a mix of bends and straights, before connecting with legendary Carmel Valley Road. The TT carbs weren't 100% sorted (I had been warned of this earlier), so the engine stumbled just off idle, then cleared up as the revs rose. It was easier just to twist the throttle and have at it, let the machine have its head, while risking my own. No, I wasn't wearing a helmet (one doesn't, typically, when emcee of an event) or gloves, but this was the Moment, and I was taking it all the way.
The friction damper knob for the girder forks is taken from a 1930s steering damper, with the Falcon logo. [Paul d'Orléans]Full throttle through the gears, but the engine had less than a mile on it, so no need to find top speed. That will happen at Bonneville this year, anyway; not my job. Around the bends, with a few bumps and undulations and a rising throttle, the Kestrel behaved flawlessly, and I watched the forks Ian built move up and down smoothly. While cranked over, the bike felt rock solid, yet light, nimble, and flickable. The brakes were really good, better than any of my drum braked machines anyway; the clutch was light, the gear selection with that delicate shifter mechanism was easy and positive.
With a saddle height of about 28" the Kestrel is mostly knee-high, but a giant of craftsmanship. [Paul d'Orleans]Surprise, the Kestrel is easy to ride, no excuses necessary, it works beautifully as a motorcycle, and felt for all the world like the big brother of my favorite bike of all time, 'The Mule', my '33 Velocette KTT - a truly magic machine which will leave my hands when they've gone cold. I would have liked a longer ride, but I was aware that the Kestrel isn't mine by a factor of 200,000, and would be missed if I didn't get back soon. Plus, we had strayed onto the public highway, and were illegal in ways foreign even to my lax standards. So a victory lap around the grass was in order, and the smile hasn't left me yet.
The fuel tanks are split pannier-style, with three elegant clamps holding them in place. Note the twin TT carbs echoed by the brass handlebar clamps. [Paul d'Orléans]Paul d'Orléans is the founder of TheVintagent.com. He is an author, photographer, filmmaker, museum curator, event organizer, and public speaker. Check out his Author Page, Instagram, and Facebook.
Beginning in the mid-Teens, factory racing teams from Indian, Harley-Davidson, and Excelsior fought a hard battle for dominance on the board- and dirt-tracks around the country. Great riders like Gene Walker, Shrimp Burns, Otto Walker, and many others made their names riding for either the Indian 'Wigwam' or the Harley 'Wrecking Crew'. The bikes they rode were little more than bicycles, with powerful V twin engines, and no brakes. Motorcycle racing was a major spectator sport and drew tens of thousands of spectators across the country.
"Bones the Outlaw" (left), Horace "Midnight" Blanton (right) with their Indian Racers - Atlanta 1924
In Atlanta, another group of racers sought fame and fortune, whose story today is virtually unknown; these black riders had colorful nicknames like Hall “Demon Wade” Ware, Horace “Midnight” Blanton, and “Bones the Outlaw,” who raced each other at Atlanta’s Lakewood Speedway from 1913 to 1924. They didn't have the latest factory racing bikes, and their racers were often cobbled together with obsolete parts from the scrap piles of local Harley and Indian dealers. They were known as Atlanta’s 'Black Streaks' and while their races were covered by the national motorcycle press, the articles reflected the racial prejudice of the day, such as a 1919 Motorcycling and Bicycling article titled “When Dinge Met Dinge in Georgia"; the text was even worse.
The Atlanta Speedway, designed in 1909 by Jack Prince, and finance by Asa Candler, the founder of Coca-Cola
In 1909, Coca Cola founder Asa Candler opened the Atlanta Speedway on what is now the site of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The two-mile oval track featured an asphalt and gravel racing surface, which was modeled after the recently opened Indianapolis Speedway. Motorcycle races (for white riders) were held there beginning in November 1909. The first mention of a motorcycle race for black riders appeared in an Atlanta Constitution article concerning events held at the Speedway on Labor Day, 1913, by the " Atlanta Colored Labor Day Association." The race featured a black automobile racer, "Hard Luck" Bill Jones, who had recently switched to racing motorcycles. The race results appeared in a later Constitution article on Jones; John Sims on an Indian was the winner.
Hall 'Demon Wade' Ware on his successful Indian racer [Motorcycling and Bicycling magazine]In May 1913, Jack Prince came to Atlanta to build a board track for motorcycle and racing. The 1/4 mile circular track, named the Atlanta Motordrome, was built on the site of the old Fairgrounds at Jackson Street NE and Old Wheat Street, close to Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church. Jack Prince built several of these early circular tracks, which featured a nearly vertical racing surface of rough sawn lumber. They were often referred to as "Saucer Tracks." From the track's opening, the Motordrome races featured the top white riders in Atlanta. Stars like Harry Glenn, Nemo Lancaster, Tex Richards, and more fought hard for wins, on the 56 degree banked 1/4 mile circular board track, in front of large crowds of enthusiastic fans.That changed in August 1913, when word got out that the Motordrome was planning a race for black riders. On September 5, 1913, the planned race was the subject of a full page, highly critical article under the headline "Dealers Condemn Atlanta's Colored Races" (Motorcycling magazine).
The article quoted local Atlanta Harley-Davidson dealer Gus Castle, and Thor/Jefferson dealer Johnny Aiken. Both dealers' statements reflected the attitude of most whites in Jim Crow Atlanta. Gus Castle stated: "I think the negro racing game is a substantial benefit, as it drives the last nail in the coffin of motorcycle track racing in Atlanta, and that's a blessing of no small importance." Aiken's stated: "Except that it will popularize motorcycling among Negros and in that way cheapen the sport in the eyes of white men." The article went on to state that there were about forty black motorcyclists in Atlanta, and that the white dealers refused to sell them new motorcycles. After reading the article in Motorcycling, Federation of American Motorcyclists (F.A.M.) Chairman John L. Donovan wired the track operators stating the Atlanta Motordrome would be "outlawed" and their race sanctions withdrawn "as the F.A.M. does not allow colored men as members." Despite the threats from Donovan, on October 19, 1913, an article appeared in the Atlanta Constitution newspaper announcing a race featuring black riders would take place at the Motordrome.
The article states "The men who ride are all experienced and have ridden motorcycles on board tracks before" (that statement seems to confirm that black riders rode on Motordrome-style board tracks in other cities, but sadly, that history has been lost). The Atlanta race was postponed twice due to rain. Weather was a constant problem at the Atlanta Motordrome - the riders could not safely race on the steep wooden banking when it was wet, and races were often postponed several times. The race featuring black riders took place at the Motordrome on afternoon of October 28, 1913, and featured black riders Bill Jones, and Lloyd Brown of Atlanta, along with the Wilson brothers from New Orleans, and Ben Griggs and Willie McCabe of Chattanooga. The Atlanta Constitution did not cover the race, and the results are unknown. Less than a month after the race, an article appeared in Motorcycling World and Bicycling Review that stated the owners of the Motordrome had filed for bankruptcy. It further stated: “This Motordrome earned an unsavory reputation by pulling off a race with negro riders, in defiance of F.A.M. regulations, thereby becoming outlawed as long as the present management exists.” The Motordrome reopened the following year under new management. There is no record of any further races featuring black riders at the track. With the opening of the Lakewood Speedway, motorcycle racing shifted away from the Motordrome.
Black rider lined up for the 1924 'Championship' race at Lakewood Speedway
The Lakewood Speedway, one-mile dirt oval, opened south of the city in 1917, and immediately began running motorcycle and auto races. The track owners revived the racing series for black riders, which they billed as the Grand Colored Motorcycle Championship Race. A black South Carolina racer named Tom Reese, who called himself the 'Champion of South Carolina', arrived in Atlanta for the June race. Reese’s manager began to brag that Reese could 'beat any Atlanta rider,' and he was prepared to place a large cash wager to back up his claim. The event drew large crowds from Atlanta’s black community, and bets were placed on the favorite riders. While the Harley-Davidson, Indian, and Excelsior factories had no involvement in these races, the local Harley-Davidson and Indian dealers gave limited assistance to their chosen racers. They also often placed large wagers between themselves on the outcome of the race.
On May 31, 1919, 'Bones the Outlaw' appeared in a photograph (was standing with his employer Harry Glenn) within a pre-race article for the 1919 Southern Dirt Track Championship, which featured top white riders from around the south, including Birmingham's Gene Walker , and Atlanta's Nemo Lancaster. At the local Indian dealer, Hall 'Demon Wade' Ware saw an opportunity; already an accomplished local racer, Ware worked for the dealer as a mechanic. He convinced his boss, Nemo Lancaster, to lend him a competitive bike to race against Tom Reese. While Lancaster recognized Ware’s talent, the rumor was he had a very large side bet with Reese’s manager. At the start of the race, Reese on a Harley-Davidson jumped out to an early lead, and Reese’s manager expected to win the wager. Ware, on the loaned Indian, soon caught the Carolina Champion and passed him, winning the race. Ware claimed the $150 first prize, and Lancaster collected on large side bet with Reese’s manager.
Horace "Midnight" Blanton, the 1924 Champion
The race in August 1919 was another hard-fought battle between 'Demon Wade' and 'Bones the Outlaw'. 'Midnight' Blanton won several of the preliminary races, and had a shot at winning the championship race. But the night before the race, Atlanta board track racer Hammond Springs (who was white) helped Wade install Springs' new Indian racing engine into Wade’s older Indian frame. The competitive engine allowed Wade the edge he needed to leave Blanton in his dust. On the final lap, he and Bones the Outlaw, crossed the line in a tie. This required a rematch, which Wade won hands down, claiming the 1919 championship.
The race held on June 5, 1922, proved to be a bit of a disappointment. Once again several racers from around the South arrived, prepared to race. When Hall Wade's bike was unloaded, the motor was covered. This gave rise to rumors that Wade had another special racing engine, which was a reasonable supposition, as Wade was close to his former employer, Harry Glenn - by then an Indian factory representative. When race time rolled around, only Horace Blanton came to the starting line to face Wade. Wade won two five-mile races, defending the Southern Champion title he'd held since 1915. The remainder of the the day's races were canceled due to the lack of competition. By the 1924 race, 'Bones the Outlaw' had switched to racing automobiles, and 'Demon Ware' had sold his machine and moved north. For the 1924 races, 'Bones the Outlaw' made a demonstration run in his racing car, blasting around the dirt oval and putting on quite a show, narrowly avoiding a crash several times. In the motorcycle race, Horace Blanton had no real competition, his two chief rivals having moved on, and he easily claimed the Championship over a field of less experienced riders.
Indian factory representative Harry Glenn's business card, autographed by Hall 'Demon Ware' Wade [Scott Bashaw Collection]In November of 1924, the owners of the Lakewood Speedway (the Bonita Theater Company) filed for bankruptcy, with C.F. Morris the receiver. An article announcing the bankruptcy stated:“This motordrome which earned an unsavory reputation by pulling off a race with negro riders, in defiance of F.A.M. regulations, thereby becoming outlawed as long as the present management exists.” With the track’s bankruptcy, the 'Black Streak' races came to an end. Still, for eight years a group of black motorcycle racers created a unique story in the 'Jim Crow' South, and had a moment in the limelight.
The Atlanta Speedway photographed in its opening year - 1909 - with a very early motorcycle race [Detroit Public Library][Sources: Armando Cecili Collection, Atlanta Constitution, Chris Price - Archive Moto and 'Georgia Motorcycle History', 'Motorcycle Racers' - Ebony Magazine Volume # 10 - 1955, Harley-Davidson.com, Hockenheim Museum Collection, Mike Bell Collection, Motorcycling and Bicycling, Scott Bashaw Collection, Stephen Wright]
"Welcome to Radnor Hunt Concours d'Elegance, gentlemen." The guards pointed our van up the manicured gravel drive; we drove past the stately clubhouse, and down the hill by the stables. As we rounded a bend we were greeted with a chorus of barking. "Look, doggies!" "They're not doggies Bryan; they're hounds." Radnor Hunt, the 'since 1882' Fox hunting club in a wealthy Philadelphia suburb, is a long way from the world of flat-track.
The remarkable Howerton Kawasaki EX650, winner of the 2016 Flat Track Championship; a study in good design
My mission for the Radnor Hunt Concours is to procure the extraordinary; that's how I landed the job as National Champion Bryan Smith's handler. I'd asked to borrow Ricky Howerton's 2016 flat-track Championship winning Howerton Racing Kawasaki, and he not only said yes, but graciously offered to send the winning rider, Bryan Smith, along with the bike. Getting the bike was terrific, but having the Champ was the icing on the cake.
The style of a Champion - Bryan Smith on his Indian at Williams Grove
The Kawasaki is called "The Skinny Bike", and its a stunningly modern interpretation of a flat-track racing motorcycle, a study in minimalism and clever reduction. Motorcycle magazines around the world fawned over this bike, and legendary motorcycle designer Miguel Galluzzi said "The Kawa is what a pure motorcycle should be," high praise from the man who invented the Ducati Monster. I was surprised no other Concours had ask to display "The Skinny Bike."
Bryan Smith seemed happy to be a guest of honor at the Radnor Hunt Concours d'Elegance. We've heard a rumor that ladies love a charming rogue...
My deal was to pick up the Skinny Bike immediately after the Williams Grove flat-track race on Saturday, and bring it to Radnor Hunt for Sunday's Concours. Bryan needed to do well in that race to retain his championship, and his riding was 'all in'; he was a contender until he pitched it away in turn three. With Smith out, the championship belonged to Jared Mees. Bryan was fine after his spill, but it's hard to watch a friend do the 'walk of shame' back to the pits, on national TV.
The Champ aboard his Indian racer on the cracked clay of Williams Grove
We loaded the Skinny Bike in the van and started heading east, stopping for a quick dinner on the road. No tables were available, so we sat at the bar - it was a hard luck day. Bryan ordered a Moscow Mule (the name says it all); more appeared in short order, courtesy of his fans, whom I think were a little shocked to see him humbly sitting at the bar. Well-wishers stopped for a selfie or an autograph, and he made time for everyone. Flat-track racing is more than a job for Bryan, it's his life.
Supercharged! An Auburn Boattail Speedster 851 shows the jockey-like stature of a good flat-track racer
As we ate dinner, I reflected how easy it was to load the "Skinny Bike" into the van. Switching to the bigger Indian flat-track racer must have been quite a change, but when asked, he just shrugged it off, admitting that the Indian was more like a Harley-Davidson XR750, as Brad Baker & Jared Mees raced last season. It's the mark of a professional that Smith hopped on the heavy Indian and was up to speed immediately...but Bryan did mention he really liked riding the Howerton Kawasaki. Perhaps he'll will race one again?
When necessary, a flat-track racer can be ridden 2-up
Offloading the Skinny Bike, we wheeled it past the big white tents spilling over with Rolls Royces, Ferraris and McLarens. Well-dressed ladies in big hats regarded us curiously, and Bryan understood why I'd forwarded the email on 'proper attire for a gentleman'. We strolled the show field after a quick breakfast in the clubhouse, and Bryan was impressed with the uniqueness of every car and bike on display, which included his own. "I've never even seen these on Google before!" Then the red-coated Huntsman's horn blared as he galloped past with his pack of hounds - the ceremonial start of the Concours. The contrast in atmosphere between Radnor Hunt and the Williams Grove flat-track couldn't be greater. Bryan rubbed elbows with the well-heeled Radnor guests, and was surprised to discover they were well-informed regarding flat-track racing, and knew about his Championship, but were more impressed with his X-Games win! That's when Bryan Smith relaxed, and the day became a positive experience for the Champ. I think Radnor Hunt has not seen the last of the flat-track scene!
The author and Bryan Smith appreciate a steam tractorA Jaguar XK120 looks good anywhereYou won't find it in Google unless you know to look! The Nigel Bennett-designed Penske PC17-Chevrolet, winner of the 1988 Indy 500 with Rick Mears driving.The 1896 Spiral motorcycle, the oldest internal-combustion motorcycle built in America, get the nod from Gavin TrippeNot at all out of place in this verdant land of horses and huntsmen...
While virtually forgotten today, Fay Taylour was among the most world's most famous motorcyclists in the 1920's, and the most successful female motorsports competitor of the 20th Century. She was a champion speedway rider in the earliest days of the sport, when races drew crowds of 30,000 people. She was a consistent winner on the dirt tracks, and not in 'ladies events' - she held the outright lap record at several speedway circuits in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, which so threatened the men behind the sport they banned all women from speedway tracks by 1930! She then took up auto racing, with less success, but still won many races between 1930-54. Until sexism quashed her ambitions, she was widely respected, interviewed, filmed, photographed, and featured on race programs as a star, wherever she went.
Fay Taylour's first taste of the press, riding her AJS 'Big Port', showing her success in the Southern Scot Scrambler in 1927
With her struggles and triumphs as a pioneer professional motorcycle racer, Taylour ought to be lauded as a feminist hero...but with some heroes, digging beyond the headlines reveals a far more complex character, and in Taylour's case, a deeply troubling story. Fay Taylour, born in Ireland of British gentry, embraced Fascism in the 1930s, in common with a other notable bluebloods, like the sisters Unity and Diana Mitford (married to Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet of Ancoats and founder of the British Union of Fascists). We would love to celebrate Taylour, but her unrepentant promotion of Fascism makes her an impossible figure. The story of her remarkable success on a motorcycle is forever colored by her conscious adoption of an ugly and hateful ideology; even before Nazism became genocidal, hatred of the Jews, people of color, queers, Gypsys, and Leftists was a foundation of Hitler's ideology, and sending these groups to death camps was a logical extension of the political philosophy spelled out in his 1925 book 'Mein Kampf'. Even after evidence of the concentration camps filtered to the world, Taylour remained unmoved, kept a photo of Hitler on her bedside, and was vocally anti-Semitic. Her Fascism began 8 years after her last speedway race, but cost her the enduring fame she'd earned as a woman in a 'man's world.'
Fay Taylour featured on a cigarette card ca 1928, aboard a Wembley Stadium-branded Douglas DT5 racer
Francis Helen Taylour was born 1904 in Birr, Ireland. She was extremely competent physically, and loved to hunt, fish, and ride horses. Her father was an officer in the Royal Irish Constabulary, and she learned to drive his Buick at the age of 10, and was a competent driver by 12. She was a champion bicyclist at her girls' school (St Trinian's), and after her mother died, she gave up academic pursuits to live with her father, who'd retired to Burghfield, a small town in Berkshire. There she met a mechanic who became a love interest, but he had a Rudge and taught Fay to ride. She soon bought a Levis 220cc two-stroke, then an OHV AJS K6 'Big Port' single in 1927. A local motorcycle dealer, Carlton Harmon, observed her skill on a motorcycle, and encouraged her to enter the 'Southern Scott Scramble' at Camberley Heath, near Reading. The Scramble was a 24-mile circuit run twice, with a 'Venus Cup' for best woman rider, which Harmon suggested Taylour could win. Harmon gave her instruction, and suggested she ride as she was inclined, which was 'flat out'. She practiced the course daily before the event, to master its several steep hills, 'Wild', 'Wooley', 'Kiliminjaro', and Camberley. She wore a distinctive oversize man's cap while riding, and during official practice for the Scramble, Jimmy Simpson and George Rowley, both factory-backed racers, couldn't keep up with the rider in the unusual cap - who they later discovered was a girl. She won both the 'Novice' and 'Venus' cups, in her second-ever motorcycle event.
Fay at Brooklands in 1928 with her Rudge, with Mrs. L. McLean
She soon won Gold Medals in the Leeds £200 Trial, the National Alan Trial, the Travers Trophy Trial, and silver in the Colmore Cotswold and Victory Trophy Trials. She even won a Gold Medal in the ACU's Six Days Trial, run over a 750-mile route, and quickly gained a reputation for remarkable personal endurance and tremendous skill at handling a motorcycle. In only four months of Trials competition, she had earned enough prize money to live on for the year, and soon looked for work in the motorcycle industry in the Midlands. She landed a job at Rudge as a secretary(!), but was selected to ride with the factory Rudge Trials team for 1928, and given a 500cc four-valve competition model. She promptly won the Ladies' Award in the London-Gloucester-London Trial, but lost the speed test, as a compression plate had been added below her Rudge's cylinder barrel. For her next trial, she worked until 3am removing the plate and rebuilding the motor in her hotel room, then rode that morning without a single loss of marks...but had to be content with a Silver medal - the same as her male factory teammates - as she'd lost 50 points for arriving late to the competition.
A classic publicity shot of Fay with a Douglas DT5 dirt track racer
In 1928, she observed one of the first dirt-track races in the UK, at Stamford Bridge. She watched amazed as the American rider 'Sprouts' Elder broadslid his Douglas racer around the horse track. Fay immediately made the rounds of various dirt tracks, asking to be given the chance to ride. All refused her, but she was typically undaunted, and went to Lewis Leathers in London to have a racing suit made to measure. While there, she met Lionel Wills, a genteel tobacco heir who loved fast motorcycles, and had learned to broadslide after watching races in Australia. The pair had a long relationship, and Wills helped Taylour make her way in the dirt-track world, partly as Wills himself had brought the sport to Britain after witnessing a dirt-track race in Sydney, Australia, and became the first cinder-track racer in the UK. He wrote articles for sports magazines back home describing the new sport, and worked with Johnnie Hoskins to bring Australian riders to the UK to seed the sport on British soil.
Sprouts Elder in Australia in 1930 aboard a Harley-Davidson 'Peashooter'
Taylour fitted a hook to her works-supplied Trials Rudge, in defiance of the factory, and wore a face mask with her leathers (common, to keep the cinders out) and snuck into an open practice session at Crystal Palace. She rode and fell repeatedly, but after a full day of trying, she started to broadslide. When Lionel Wills told track manager Freddie Mockford that the irrepressible rider practicing on his track was female, he nearly spat his cigar. But Wills lied that she'd been signed up at 'all the other tracks', so Mockford gave Taylour a week to practice before the next race. She wired Charles Vernon Pugh, the Managing Director of Rudge, to support her with a dirt-track racer, and when he refused, she purchased a Douglas DT5 racer. But before it came, she rode her modified Trials machine, which was far heavier than the specialist dirt track models being hurriedly offered by almost every manufacturer. Still, she proved her skills on the track, and more importantly was a huge draw at races, and the press had a field day with 'Eve on the Sport Field' headlines.
Another shot of Fay on a Douglas DT5
In 1928, Taylour was the first dirt track racer from Europe or the USA to travel to Australia, the home of the sport, to compete with the legends Down Under. She first landed in Perth, where she trumped the 'unbeatable' Sig Schlam on his home track, equalling the track record, then went to Melbourne, where she trounced the local hero Reg West, and held the lap record at his track for a year. After a successful tour of Australia and New Zealand, in which she was heavily advertised in advance of races with tens of thousands of spectators, she returned to Britain and won the Cinders Trophy for the fastest lap in an International contest, in front of a crowd of 30,000. At a race in Southhampton she even beat Sprouts Elder, the legendary American dirt-track expert, who would shortly follow her example and create a global speedway circuit between Argentina, New Zealand, Australia, the USA, and Britain, following the weather between hemispheres and riding seasons.
As her fame spread, Fay was featured on race programs and collectable cigarette cards
Taylour returned to New Zealand and Australia after the end of the UK riding season in late 1929; she was greeted as a star Down Under, and promoted as one. She defeated the New Zealand champion (Mattson) and recorded FTD at Auckland, then took .8sec off the lap record at the Dunedin track, beating the local champion (Young). She returned to the UK in Spring of 1930 to discover that women had been banned from the dirt tracks, and in May 1930, women were banned from riding speedway in Australia too! According to Taylour's biographer Brian Belton, it wasn't the promoters and riders who stopped women racing, it was the insurance companies who feared the reaction if a woman was killed in a race.
A female competitor was worth publicizing for race promoters, who saw the literal value of women on the track
Banned from doing what she loved, she turned in 1930 to racing cars. For the next 24 years she had various successes, setting a record on the 'Rianchi Run', a 300-mile course from Calcutta, driving a 1931 Chevrolet, which gained her an entry at Brooklands in late 1931 aboard a Le Mans Talbot 105, in a women's race, which she also won. She won the Leinster Trophy in Ireland in 1934 (driving an Adler Trumpf), and won the Hill Circuit Trophy at the Shelsey Walsh hillclimb. She won a women's race at Donington, competed in the Mille Miglia, and again at Brooklands with a Alfa Romeo 8C Monza, coming in second after lapping at 114mph. She was so full of excitement driving the Alfa that she continued hot lapping the circuit after the race, and had to be stopped by a flagman stepping in front of her car; she thought it a great joke, but she was disqualified from the race and fined.
Fay with the Alfa Romeo 8c Monza racer at Brooklands
In Septermber 1939, Britain declared war on Germany, and Fay Taylour became outspoken in her support of Hitler, and against the war. She had visited Germany many times since 1928, driven factory-loaned Adler race cars, and gotten to know officials in the NSKK (Nazi sport bureau). Her anti-war, pro-German advocacy was unattached at that point to any organized political party, but she played a German radio station loudly to annoy her neighbors, and proclaimed her views in restaurants, in letters to friends, and to newspapers, as well as with (illegal) leaflets she distributed. All that earned her a visit by the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police in 1939, which only increased her public support for Hitler, and she soon joined Oswald Moseley's British Union of Fascists. She also attended gatherings of the Right Club, and after Club member Tyler Kent's arrest for spying (he'd stolen 2000 secret telegrams between Churchill and Roosevelt), Defense Regulation 18-B was enacted, allowing known Fascists to be imprisoned without trial. On May 30th, 1940, Taylour was arrested at her home, and interned at Holloway Women's Prison in London, along with the Diana Mitford - over 1000 British citizens were so imprisoned. She was later sent to Port Erin prison on the Isle of Man, and in her recently released MI5 file, her prison warden described her as "one of the worst pro-Nazis in Port Erin...she is in the habit of hoarding pictures of Hitler and had in her possession a hymn in which his name was substituted for God's." After 3 years of imprisonment, Taylour was exiled to Ireland in 1943, as she held Irish citizenship - that country was officially neutral during WW2 - but remained under scrutiny by British security services until 1976, as she became a conspiracy theorist, and carried on agitating for extremist ideologies and groups for the rest of her life.
During a postwar tour of Australia, driving midget cars, she drove under a British flag, with the Irish shamrock
After the War, with her reputation soured in Britain, she emigrated to the US and took up midget car racing, and selling British cars in Lost Angeles. After a visit back to London in 1952, she was barred from returning to the United States due to her political history. She took up auto racing in Britain, and traveled to race in Ireland, Sweden, and Australia, and was the only pre-War female auto racer to take the wheel competitively post-War. She was allowed to return to the USA in 1953, and raced cars for another year, before giving up racing for good in 1954. She remained in the US until 1971, attempting without success to publish her memoirs and have a film made of her life, and worked odd jobs. She returned to Britain in 1972, and compiled her autobiography, which was never published (she rightly blamed her politics), but her collected notes did form the basis of Brian Belton's flawed book (it devotes barely one paragraph to her politics, and her auto racing) 'Fay Taylour Queen of Speedway', published in 2006, long after her 1983 death. A far more comprehensive biography is Stephen Michael Cullins' 2015 dissertation, 'Fanatical Fay Taylour; Her Sporting and Political Life at Speed, 1904-1983'.
Fay with her Lewis Leathers speedway gear
Taylour's story is fascinating, and tragic. Her 4-year motorcycle racing career shone brightly enough to earn her a permanent place in the motorsports Pantheon, but the ugliness of her political views changed her reputation from glorious to notorious.
A glimpse into her character can be gleaned from an Australian newspaper interview in 1930, on the conclusion of her final world dirt-track tour: “When, three years ago, I got my first motorbike, I was told I should break my neck. But I didn’t! In fact, I entered for the Southern Scots Scramble at Camberley in that same year. It was a grueling test for both machine and rider, but more especially for the rider. Much against his will, and after a great deal of persuasion, an uncle had financed me for this event. I had sworn to win it! He didn’t believe it possible. But, I felt it was, because I wanted it to be the means of making a new career. So I kept on saying to myself: ‘Girl, you must win!’ And win I did! From that date my career as a racing motorcyclist began.
“I wanted speed. I had won a score or so of cups, but you can’t live on cups! When, in the early part of last year, I saw the dirt-track speeding, I made up my mind to go in for these new thrills. I was refused admission to three speedway tracks, one after the other. Then, whilst the officials were in the Isle of Man last year for the T.T. races, I took advantage of their absence to test myself on the dirt track at Crystal Palace. The result was that, by the time they returned, I was able to show them efficiency in the new sport. I was established, and, as is generally known, I made the most of my opportunities there during the summer of last year. Even a woman can get what she wants, when her want is strong enough."
It isn’t an everyday occurrence, finding yourself in a time capsule house in France, looking at a 1940 Triumph Tiger 100, sat parked in a hallway since the 1980s. Prewar T100s are rare — they were rare when new — and given the onset of WW2, 1940 models are very rare indeed. Most were exported to the United States, but a few went elsewhere. This machine in the hallway was ordered new by a Frenchman, who collected it from a Triumph dealer in the northern French town of Amiens, in November 1939.
The 1938 Triumph brochure announcing the Tiger 100 model
Historians among you will doubtless wonder what kind of nonsense you are reading, given that the British War Department requisitioned all stocks from the largest motorcycle factories, shortly after the declaration of war with Germany - September 3rd 1939. Triumph motorcycles were not exempt... except for the firm’s 500cc parallel twins. They were considered too exotic and high-performance for the armed forces, and no mechanics had yet been trained to work on anything but sidevalve singles. Not only did the military not want the Speed Twins and Tiger 100s, but Triumph was authorised to continue producing and exporting them despite the war, and the governmental interdiction on civilian vehicle production announced in May 1940. Thus in the United States, the late summer and autumn 1940 issues of Motorcyclist magazine carried Triumph advertisements bearing Managing Director Edward Turner’s signature under the following, somewhat Churchillian announcement.
Edward Turner's message to American riders...buy our product!
“At a time when the British Empire is faced with the greatest menace in its long history, we send our greetings to our American friends and fellow motorcycling enthusiasts. The Triumph Company, as in the last war, is almost exclusively engaged in the manufacture of motorcycles for the British Army. We shall. however. be permitted to send to the U.S.A., and Canada, supplies of our twin-cylinder types which have made so many friends amongst sporting American riders. By this means we hope to continue out contribution to private motorcycling — the finest of all open air sports.”
A 1939 magazine cover ad for the Tiger 100 Triumph, with the light from Edward Turner's mind shining on his remarkable creation
By Summer 1940, of course, the Germans were installed in Paris and all along the coast facing Britain, having invaded France and other countries that May. But in November 1939, when ‘our’ Tiger 100 arrived in Amiens, Britain, France and Germany were still engaged in what Germans nicknamed the Sitzkrieg, and the British called ‘The Phoney War’. Lines of communication and trade between Britain and France remained open. Triumph owner Jack Sangster was a powerful businessman, and persuaded his pals in government on the fiscal benefits of permitting his firm to carry on exporting its successful 500cc twins to the all-important US marketplace, where Turner had bolstered Triumph’s presence since 1937. That Triumph was awarded the prestigious Maude’s Trophy in November 1939 surely helped Sangster’s argument.
The Maudes Trophy
In late February 1939, Auto Cycle Union (ACU) officials were invited to choose a random Tiger 100 from any Triumph dealer they wished, and a Speed Twin from any other Triumph dealer. The selected T100 and 5T were registered for the road by the Triumph works as EDU 223 and EDU 224 respectively (EDU being a Coventry registration prefix). To run in the motors, Triumph employees rode the two twins from the factory in Coventry to John O’Groats on the northernmost tip of Britain – around 580 miles. Followed by ACU observers, the Triumphs were then ridden from John O’Groats to Land’s End - Britain’s southernmost point.
The Maudes Trophy team at Brooklands, before the high-speed tests - the Tiger 100 on the left and Speed Twin on the right.
The weather conditions in the Scottish Highlands were atrocious, but the riders pressed on with reduced speed, and on reaching Land’s End, they rode to Brooklands. There two experienced Brooklands Boys took the handlebars, and rode the Triumphs at high speed around that banked autodrome for six hours. The Tiger 100 and Speed Twin were then ridden back to the works in Coventry, and stripped for inspection under ACU observation. Negligible wear was found in the motors. The road route of over 1,800 miles was covered at an average speed of 42 mph. At Brooklands, the T100 averaged 78.5 mph with a best lap of 88.46 mph and the Speed Twin was not much slower at an average of 75.02 mph and a best lap of 84.41 mph. Apart from two flat tires and one of the machines falling over whilst parked on its stand, the riders encountered no problems, and Triumph was awarded the coveted Maudes Trophy in November 1939.
The Motor Cycle magazine's road test of the 1938 Tiger 100
Triumph’s new Tiger 100 model was first tested by the British monthly Motor Cycling a year before (November 1938), and had reached 98 mph in full road trim, which was very fast; in those years, a family sedan might blow a gasket or worse if driven at 60 mph for any distance. The Tiger 100 cost £80 (plus £2 10s for the speedo), and would easily exceed 100 mph on open pipes. When Triumph introduced the so-called ‘cocktail shaker’ silencers for the 1939 season, riders could remove the quickly-detachable end caps and baffles, transforming the silencers into open megaphones. Every Tiger 100 built in Coventry (ie, before the factory was bombed during WW2, and rebuilt in Meriden, near Birmingham) came with a dynamometer test certificate, and differed from its Speed Twin brother only with 8:1 compression pistons, polished inlet tracts, and a 1/16” larger carb – enough for a claimed 8hp increase! By comparison, BSA’s 500cc M24 Gold Star single cost £82 exclusive of extras like pillion footrests and the speedometer and might hit 95 mph downhill with the wind behind it. The competition and racing versions were faster but cost more. A Vincent H.R.D. Comet cost £86 plus extras and was good for 90 mph with a jockey-sized rider aboard. To borrow the catchphrase of a motorcycle dealer I knew in London decades ago, who had started racing in the 1930s, the Tiger 100 was “a lot of bike for the money, son!”
The Picardy Tiger
But back to our Picardy Tiger 100, the King of Route 29. The story is third-hand, the main players no longer around, but it’s a good tale and worth telling, and probably true (or as true as such stories can be). My friend Laurent Mimart, or ‘Mimo’ to those who know him as France’s go-to man for pre-unit Triumphs, mentioned a 1939 Tiger 100 he’d heard of in Saint-Quentin, on the Somme river in Picardy. Yeah, we’ve all heard those stories, but we had nothing else going that day so we drove from Paris. The house was a 1950s time warp, and was full of Triumph motorcycles and spares dating from the 1920s to the 1950s. It took us a couple of hours to dig a 1926 sidevalve and its parts out of the earthen floor of the dungeon-like cellar with our bare hands. There was a rare and genuine 1953 US market 6T Blackbird parked in the hallway, its cylinder head in a crate in a bedroom serving as a workshop. The Tiger 100 sat behind the Blackbird, its striking but non-original green-and-black finish typical of an older French enthusiast’s fondness for personalising his motorbikes. Mimo and I didn’t care about the green paint, being riders rather than collectors; what grabbed our attention was the engine number prefix: 40-T100.
Let’s call the Triumph’s owner 'Gaston Blanchard'. He had died and his brother needed to clear the house out, but he didn’t want to sell Gaston’s motorbikes to any Tom, Dick or Harry. They had to go to people of whom his brother would have approved. As we sat drinking coffee in the dusty old house, Gaston’s brother told us the story of the Tigre Cent as he recalled it. In 1966, or maybe it was 1965, the nineteen year-old Blanchard, a keen scrambles fan like many Frenchmen at the time, was looking for an old motorbike to use as a field hack. Someone put him in touch with a Monsieur Morin, a retired railway signalman who lived near Amiens, some eighty kilometres to the west of Saint-Quentin along the Route Nationale 29, a post-Napoleonic highway that runs almost as straight as a Roman road between the two towns.
Blanchard rode there with his brother. Morin did indeed have an old motorbike that he hadn’t used in more than a dozen years since the lights had stopped working because the dynamo was foutu (f*cked). It was a fast machine, though, a Tigre Cent that he had owned “since the war”. It was the fastest motorcycle on the RN29 for a time, except for a very loud motorbike that had overtaken him one night at high speed and pulled away into the gloom. Knowing that a Tiger 100 in good tune was capable of just short of the magic ton in road trim, Mimo and I wondered aloud if the faster rider might have been on one of the first postwar Vincent H.R.D. Rapides imported to France just after WW2. Blanchard’s brother disagreed, saying that Morin had spoken of having to hide the Tiger 100 before he could seek out the challenger to prevent the French armed forces from requisitioning it.
The Picardy Tiger isn't 100% original, with a later headlamp and the green paint job (very BSA!), but most of of the parts are correct.
So this Tiger 100 had been in France since before the war? No, said the brother. It had been imported from England during the war, but before the German invasion. It was a 1939 machine, he said, laying a 1980s document on the table, which gave the date of first registration as 1939. According to the (few remaining) factory records that survived the German air raid on Coventry during the night of November 14th 1940, when the Triumph works were destroyed, Triumph produced a total of 8,818 motorcycles from January to November 1940, of which just 274 were Tiger 100s. The engine and frame numbers of Morin’s T100 suggest it rolled off the Priory Street production line in October 1939. So the French bureaucrat who issued a new registration document in the 1980s was not mistaken: the T100 was indeed made in 1939 but for the 1940 season.
Tigers in Wartime
After Triumph relocated to Meriden, the firm was able to complete a few orders using parts salvaged from the ruins of the Coventry works. The Hollywood actor Rod Taylor is said to have received his new Speed Twin in 1942, delivered in a crate marked as tractor engine spares. Maybe this was the bike Taylor rode up to Hollister in 1947 with other Hollywood area bikers, but that is another story. Some students of the subject believe the last ‘Coventry Tiger 100’ made was the racer ordered by Rody Rodenberg on March 30th 1940 and dispatched to the US on May 18th that year. Rodenberg’s specifications included the optional bronze cylinder head and an Amal TT carburettor. Sold at auction by Bonhams in 2010, Rodenberg’s T100 comprises frame number TF 4030 and engine number T100-31131, Triumph having dropped the year prefix by then, according to some sources.
Before: The Triumph Priory Street shipping departement in 1939, as Tiger 100s are sent to Melbourne
The topic of late prewar and early wartime Triumph frame and engine numbers is worth a digression if only to save people from buying bitzas or, now that prices are rising, fakes. From 1937 on, all new Tiger engines were numbered in sequence, regardless of the model type. The 1938 Speed Twin engine, though not a Tiger, was included in this sequence, as was the Tiger 100 when it arrived for 1939. The 5T engine was fitted to the Tiger 90 chassis, which was given its Amaranth Red and chrome finish to distinguish it from the blue-lined silver-grey/chrome colour scheme of the Tigers. The engine numbers were prefixed by the year and model codes. The 500cc and 600cc engines were fitted to Triumph’s heavyweight chassis whose serial numbers were prefixed by the code TH for ‘Triumph Heavyweight’. The smaller models had lighter frames marked TL for ‘Triumph Lightweight’. However, the TH frame was barely able to absorb the power of the new twin engine and when racers and dragsters tuned their Speed Twins, frames and lugs would crack.
After: The Coventry Triumph factory after it was bombed on November 14th 1940. The factory was subsequently moved to Meriden, near Birmingham
The Speed Twin engine produced 26bhp, or more with hotter pistons and cams. However, the six-stud barrel-to-crankcase joint was prone not just to oil leakage at sustained high revs, but sudden, violent separation as studs were ripped from the alloy. Triumph introduced a new crankcase and cylinder block for the T100 with an eight-stud joint. The cylinder head was also new, with a larger one-inch inlet manifold and polished ports. It was made by the Birmingham firm of Birco, which some say explains the B suffix to the part number: E1454B. Birco also produced the optional bronze head (as fitted to the Rodenberg racer) that cost an extra £7 4s or $36 at contemporary exchange rates. The prewar bronze heads were also numbered E1454B but Birco produced a batch of bronze T100 heads for Triumph just after the war, in response to orders from the United States. These postwar heads were numbered E2258.
Another view of the 'Priory Street works' in Coventry, as photographed by factory service manager Alec Masters on the day after the bombing.
Some tuners fitted the T100 head to Speed Twin engines as the head stud configuration remained unrevised. I have a low-mileage 1939 Speed Twin motor given to me years ago by the son of a London Ton-Up Boy who had used for a season in his Norton-Triumph Special as a temporary replacement for his blown-up all-alloy T100C engine. The Ton-Up Boy had fitted it with a new T100 iron head, and I can confirm that the Triumph sales blurb about ‘polished ports’ was no lie. The Tiger 100 came with 8:1 forged alloy ‘slipper’ pistons. Other than that, the internals were Speed Twin, including the camshafts. In other words, the standard engine produced 34bhp, 8bhp over the Speed Twin. Tuned carefully, it was capable of far more, as Triumph’s Chief Development Engineer Freddie Clarke proved when he set a lap record of 118 mph at Brooklands in 1939.
A 1939 Triumph Tiger 100 catalog showing the Motor Cycle's power test of their motor
As stocks of the six-stud 5T crankcases were used up during the 1938 season, 5T motors were built using the new eight-stud crankcase and cylinder block but the existing 5T head. Towards the end of the 1939 production run, a few dozen 5T motors were installed in T100-spec TF frames. From then on, all Triumph heavyweights had TF frames. A total of 4,413 TF frames are logged in surviving Triumph records to 1942, by which time Triumph was in Meriden and concentrating on military motorcycles and other war-essential products. In other words, all genuine Coventry Tiger 100s should have TF frames but not all of the higher-numbered TF frames began life as Tiger 100s. As we know, just 274 of the 8,818 motorcycles made in Coventry from January to November 1940 were Tiger 100s. The first 1940 Tiger 100s would have been assembled from late-August 1939 onwards.
The Picardy Tigre Cent as it survives today
One of these was the Tigre Cent ordered by Monsieur Morin, Roi de la RN29 or King of Route 29 for a brief time early in the winter of 1939, before he had to hide his T100 from the French military and then, of course, the Germans. As a railway signalman, Morin was in a reserved occupation and therefore exempt from the military mobilisation of all Frenchmen of military age. This explains why he was around to collect his new Triumph from the firm’s northern French concessionaire, the Grand Garage Paul Passet in Amiens. Blanchard’s brother mentioned Passet’s as the place where his brother went to order spares for the T100. Founded by Paul Passet before WW1, the dealership had a second branch in Abbeville by the late 1930s, and sold other imported marques like BSA. Paul Passet’s son Georges was a well-respected Clubman racer in the 1930s. In 1970, when the Bol d’Or was held at the Montlhéry circuit south of Paris for the last time, Georges’ son Jean-Paul would race Triumph factory racer Percy Tait’s T150 triple, such was the close relationship between the Passet family and Triumph. The dealership closed down in 1980 and their old Amiens premises now houses the town’s Police Municipale.
Le Roi de Route 29
Many French speed freaks on two, three and four wheels tried their luck on the RN29 in the interwar years, after the abolition of speed limits on French highways in 1922. You could get up to full race speeds between the towns and villages along the 80-kilometre or 50-mile stretch between Amiens and Saint-Quentin, cutting across the Picardy landscape like a steel rule. Prudence aside, the law required that you slow down through built-up area, and the gendarmes would lie in wait, hoping to catch roadhogs and hooligans rash enough accelerate before the derestriction signs marking the end of the speed limit. As Morin told the Blanchard brothers in the mid-1960s, ‘les flics’ had nothing capable of catching his Tigre Cent on full song. Running from the cops was easier when they did not have radios to alert their comrades further up the road…but they still telephone ahead in the late 1930s. If hotshoe riders like Morin thought they’d been clocked, they would turn off the highway into the hinterlands, lying low for a while, before returning home through the back lanes. At night, it was even easier to vanish, by simply turning off their lights.
Laurent Mimart, or 'Mimo' aboard the Picardy Tiger in Paris
Morin, as an ‘essential worker,’ needed to travel between different railway signal boxes in the Amiens area, and had a fuel allowance for a motorcycle, but once the French authorities started requisitioning private vehicles (including more than 56,000 motorcycles, many of which would end up in German hands), Morin would have been expected to take the train to work, or to use a bicycle. No more gallivanting up and down the RN29. As mentioned, he must have hidden his precious Tiger 100, first form the French military, then the Germans. After the war, Morin retrieved his Tiger 100 from its hiding place and used it as daily transport, until the dynamo stopped working. After Gaston Blanchard bought the T100 from Morin, he used and abused it as a field scrambler for another few years until the magneto died. As anyone who has a prewar Triumph twin knows, the twin-lead version of the Lucas Magdyno is a rare item, so the T100 was going nowhere. Blanchard dumped it in the cellar of his mother’s house in Saint-Quentin.
The article's author, Prosper Keating, on the Picardy Tiger
Taking early retirement in the 1980s, the unmarried Gaston Blanchard moved in with his mother. He bought a 6T Blackbird and became quite keen on classic bikes, even subscribing to the British magazine Classic Bike and joining the Triumph Owners Motor Cycle Club, whose badge we found on his workbench. At some point Blanchard must have realised that his old T100 was in fact quite special, and worth restoring. His paint job was competent but gives the Tiger the look of a BSA. His homemade wiring harness was rustic and an eyesore with only thick red wires, but it works well. However, Gaston Blanchard’s engine-building and fitting skills were beyond reproach. He renovated the engine and transmission with genuine, new old-stock parts. The rare MN2L Magdyno is a Lucas-reconditioned unit dated 1954, with an expensive-looking bronze plate repair to the drive end bearing housing. It must have cost a lot, even in the 1980s. Judging by the faint traces of soot on the plugs and in the ends of the cocktail shaker silencers, which appear to be genuine NOS pieces (as nobody was making replicas back then), Blanchard probably fired the Tiger 100 up a few times to check the timing and lighting. We can be sure that he did not ride it as the bottom fork yoke was fitted back-to-front, interfering with the chassis geometry. It would have been dangerous. In any case, he had his 650cc Triumph, which locals remember seeing him riding from time to time.
The Picardy Triumph as encountered on Canal St. Martin in Paris
We took the Triumph back to Paris, where Mimo and I sorted out the fork, and checked the engine and transmission. Jake Robbins Vintage Engineering supplied the right fork spring - Blanchard had fitted a spring from the lightweight chassis. The fork is not the 1940 type with the double counter-springs but that is just a detail, like the paintjob. The headlamp is wrong but who’s asking? It throws a beam up the road and finding an 8-inch original or a decent copy is not a priority. The priority is to run-in the motor carefully and take the Tigre Cent back to the Route Nationale 29, which still exists but was renamed the D1029, with heavy traffic routed on the new A29 motorway, built a few kilometres to the south. Mechanically, the motor is almost noiseless, with minimal noise from the transmission and gearbox. The cocktail shaker silencers emit a powerful burble that rises to a menacing snarl when the throttle is blipped. The twistgrip is a very rare, original example of the ratchet type available as an option to riders wanting a form of cruise control. It is useful as enables you to make hand signals, although most car drivers these days are unfamiliar with hand signals, apart from the single or twin-finger variety one makes after being cut off by them. I have never liked the rubber-mounted handlebars fitted to late 1930s Triumphs but tightened up good and hard, the bars don’t move and handling is very light and precise. Speed cameras and traffic cops with penalty quotas to fill each month will make it hard to beat Monsieur Morin’s times between Amiens and Saint-Quentin in November 1939, but we will salute his ghost as we give the old Tigre Cent a handful of throttle along the RN29. Perhaps the ghosts of World War One, who haunt the many battlefields along the route, will remember Monsieur Morin’s Triumph.
Want to put your BikeExif-ready Scrambler to the test? No, not on the mean streets of LA or Paris, but the sand and rocks of Morocco! Scram Africa is organized by Barcelona's Fuel Bespoke custom shop, as a way to get out and have some fun on cool machinery, regardless its suitability for the terrain. As Bespoke puts it on their website; it's 'more than a trip, it's an amazing experience about overcoming, adventure and friendship. A trip of more than 2000 km for scramblers to the south of Morocco by roads, trails and dunes. A trip only for nostalgic riders!'
As 'nostalgic riders' ourselves (whatever that means), the appeal of taking a converted 30-year of BMW roadster over 1200 miles of rough terrain sounds like tremendous fun, and a lot of hard work. That matches the description of ace photographer Götz Göppert, who rode along with the traveling Scram circus this year. Here are his thoughts on the event:
"I’d been to Morocco for work in fashion shoots, and the people are great, very helpful. Wherever you go they try to help you, sell you things and offer you drinks. On this trip we didn’t get to see a lot of people though, we were always on a bike. We started in Tangier and visited the largest souk (market) in the world, we had half a day off for that. With lots of little villages in the middle of nowhere, when we finally stopped you’re happy to get off the bike and sit by the pool for a while, and in the morning you’re happy to get on your bike and get out of there!
"Karles (Fuel Bespoke) called and asked if I'd shoot this year's ride; it was exactly the right moment. I called Ducati and got one of their new Scramblers. It’s kind of a city bike, and not really meant to do this sort of ride - I brought it back broken! They didn’t mind. There were 18 bikes, 4 broke down, and there was one serious accident. Almost all the bikes had issues. We had a mechanic with a car who followed us, he repaired the machines when we'd arrive at the end of the day, starting at 5 or 6pm, but some bike didn’t get in till 10pm!
"Some of these bikes were 30 years old, so it was a real adventure, and real work on these street bikes; they were heavy, it was very soft sand, and it was hard work. Some were basically stock BMWs with knobby tires, and the riders had no experience riding off-road like this. They were heavy bikes, they’d get stuck in the sand, and it took 2 people at least to push them out, in the middle of the day in the heat! But you meet a lot of great people. We’d all take turns pushing each other.
They've been doing the trip 6 or 7 years now. We began on the Barcelona-Tangier ferry, then we crossed the countryside into the desert, where there's nothing dangerous but the occasional goat. On the flat areas you could see 100km in front of you, there was so much empty space, and then the mountains in the distance. If there was a house, we'd stop, have some tea and dates, and go off again! The lowland areas were really soft sand, and the mountain roads were made of big rocks. It was really hot in the desert, 35-38 degrees, while in the mountains it was chilly, like 7 or 8 degrees, so you needed warm clothes and cold clothes.
You can’t go over the sandy parts too fast, as you don’t want to break your bike, and if you break yourself it’s a long way from the hospital. In the Atlas mountains it’s all green, and very pretty; then in the sahara you’re on the sand. I never used the tents, just slept on the sand, on a mattress, and in the morning you shake the scorpions from your boots. You don’t see anything but the stars, there’s nothing else out there. It’s something you can’t forget."
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"The desert was really hot, you ride all day, there's good food in Morocco - its really nice."
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"In some places it's all flat, and you go straight for 100km, and there’s nothing. You see the mountains at the end, and you keep going, and there’s nobody."
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"Some of the riders were on basically stock 30-year old BMWs with knobbies, and no experience off road like this. They were heavy bikes, they’d get stuck in the sand, it took 2 people to push them in the heat! But you meet a lot of great people. We’d all take turns pushing each other."
Disneyland for revivalist gearheads. That pretty much sums up the Goodwood Revival, the enormously popular retro-themed event held on the expansive grounds of Lord Charles March's estate in the south of England. However you feel about mixing those 3 words will probably determine your feelings about Goodwood, as it's the best summary we can provide, having attended the event occasionally since 2004. It's a fun, expensive, crowded, colorful, anachronistic dress-up party, with a very wide latitude on the suggested 'period' attire (1940s-60s), and a surprisingly large percentage of participants playing along with the game.
George Formby lives! From the film 'No Limit', filmed on the Isle of Man - another Revival!
The remarkable effect of 90% period attire at a vintage motorsports/aviation carnival is amazing photography. Not that acclaimed French photographer Laurent Nivalle needed the costumes to boost his work; he was hired by Sebastien Chirpaz of A Piece of Chic to cover the event. But, since vintage suits and dresses are omnipresent at Goodwood, his photos gorgeously capture the eerie simulacra of contemporary mechanical and human subject matter merging into a slot in our collective memory. Since we learn the history of the period in question through photographs, Goodwood can really bend the mind!
1942? Could be, with a slightly de-saturated photo and the right outfit...
Goodwood is centered around the history of this private racing circuit, which was active on the European Formula One and club racing circuit from 1948-1966. The vehicles (and outfits) are nominally expected to fall within this timeline, and the best of the era comes out to play on the race track. Videos of the auto racing in particular show drivers really trying, whether they're in a Ford Cortina or a Ferrari GTO; the circuit is narrow, with a wide (but not very wide) grass verge, and spins are common. As the grass makes an even more slick surface than the track, over-exuberant drifting can lead to body-damaging shunts into the boundary walls. And everyone likes to see a multi-$Million getting used, and dented!
Patina earned through racing hours - the lovely Norton Manx of Swedish rider 'Esso' Gunnarsson
Goodwood also incorporates some fun motorcycle racing, although there are as many contemporary racing bikes - replicas - as genuine vintage motorcycles. Granted, the replicas are raced hard in the Lansdowne Series, and certainly fit with the reenactment vibe; there are also genuine Aermacchis, Nortons, and BMW Rennsports on the track. But there isn't the depth of exotica to match the automotive side, which is far more impressive, with rows of amazing GP and circuit-racing cars, their curvaceous bodywork tugging at some part of our hearts as Desire.
The tell-tale nose of a Jaguar D-Type in the basic paddocks at Goodwood
The aviation component is simply remarkable, and perhaps the most moving of all the activities, with a slew of old warbirds (Mustangs, Corsairs, Spitfires, Lightnings) taking off and flying in formation throughout the weekend event. Great sightlines of the parked planes, and the ability to inspect some up close, is a pure thrill, without the envy generated by some of the cars. Nobody expects to own a Spitfire except in a fantasy, but we all drive cars, and can't help but compare ourselves with the rich sods able to whack a mighty dent in their 250GTO Ferrari while the racing. That's burning thousand-dollar bills by the second!
The motorcycle racing camp - there are plenty of other motorcycles in various spots
If you've never been, you really must. We'll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions, but there's plenty of fun to be had, and lots of interesting people to chat with. If you're not a VIP, you might get annoyed at the 'velvet ropes' around the most interesting machinery - the GP cars, the champagne tents, etc. The keen-eyed will spot the 'helicopter crowd' who fly in wearing bespoke vintage outfits from French couture houses - as spectacular as the cars in some cases, and sometimes just as expensive! The rest of us can enjoy the scene from the sidelines.
An RAF Ariel outisde the Spitfire LoungeIt may be a Revival, but a Spitfire evokes real-deal emotions whenever it fliesA simulated film crew in a revival of a war scenario...but all the right gear in placeRain + Rockers = EnglandCareful attention to detail separates the true enthusiasts from the looky-loos...Yes, that's a Vought F4U Corsair coming in to land...Ack ack and all that.Oh lucky lad!Ready for a spin?Mechanics and crew at the races are required to wear white coveralls, which eases fashion decisions greatly!A Douglas DC-3 and the sky it belongs in...The Francis Barnett two-stroke racer, normally seen at the Brooklands MuseumDetails of the oil pump on the little Francis-Barnett racerWomen's RAF inform, I believe?Like a good carnival, there are mechanized rides and old-fashioned games galorGoodwood hires various troupes of models to pose around the venue over the weekendJake Turner of London's Mean Fuckers MC (he's really not so mean!) sports the full 'coffee shop cowboy' outfitJake's badges, collected since the early 1980sCool enough for furs, apparently.The ladies of the vintage American iron brigadeA replica of the 'Quadrophenia' scooter as ridden by Sting in the filmNever get out of the car, young man. My only advice on being allowed to steer the Lotus.Examining the cars under repair and maintenance between races is fascinating; the structure of their chassis, the details of their suspension, the the erotic twists of their exhaustLunch for the crew!Belt drive on a vintage Manx? Well, it does leak less oil that way...but of course, people raced with chain primary drives for 100 years...Corsair and Mustang, heroes at their ease...A beautiful combo; the Grindlay-Peerless 'Hundred Model' raced by EJ Tubb at Brooklands, winner of Best in Show at Villa d'Este, and a Norton Model 18 racerA better shot of the Norton, which was truly hot stuff in 1926!An military Norton in the RAF campA Norton 16H military looking well used in the mud...'Fork-tail devil' as named by the Germans - a P38 Lightning1958? In the Norton campJaguar town; lightweight E-Types, Lister-Jaguars, D-types, etc - all the great catsA Lotus XI tears through past the grandstandsThe Spitfire Bar is a lovely spot for a beer or hot lunch; note the Ariel W/NG, and the Aston Martin 'Ulster' in the background.
Ernst Henne, the ultimate pre-war speed demon, and the supercharged BMW pushrod WR750 which was so devastatingly fast
The Golden Age of supercharged racers was a brief but glorious moment, when competing factories built ultra-exotic machines which laid the foundations of modern motorcycling. By pushing the boundaries of engine and chassis technology, new designs were adapted out of necessity, like perimeter frames, front and rear hydraulic suspension, wind-tunnel tested fairings, etc. The power discovered through forcing an air/fuel mix into an engine - a 40% gain in HP, at best - revealed problems with high-speed stability and wind-cheating which are still being addressed by ever-faster sport bikes.
Romantic 1936 BMW brochure boasting Henne’s success
The German and Italian factories were the first to embrace supercharging as a race policy, and integrated blowers with their racing engines from as early as 1925. By the mid-1930s, all companies competing in the Grand Prix series were at least experimenting with blowers and multi-cylinder engines, barring Norton, who remained true to their naturally aspirated single-cylinder racers. While AJS had a blown V-four, and Velocette a blown vertical twin (the 'Roarer'), these machines were underdeveloped compared to their competition from BMW, DKW, NSU, Moto Guzzi, and Gilera, whose racers dominated the high-speed stakes in every racing capacity - 250cc and 350cc for the Guzzi flat-single and DKW two-stroke racers, 500cc for the BMW flat twins, NSU vertical twins, and Gilera 4s.
Joe Wright aboard the OEC-Temple-JAP on which he took Henne's record at Arpajon in 1930.
The World Speed Record was the sole property of supercharged motorcycles from September 19 1929 onwards, when Ernst Henne took the first of his many records on a blown WR750, with a pushrod 750cc motor based on the BMW R63, on the straightaway at Schleissheim, Germany, at 134.68mph. Henne's record was challenged the following summer by Austrian Brough Superior importer Eddy Meyer, who added a supercharger to his SS100, and a new JAP 8/50 racing motor, but French customs officers refused to import his special racing fuel, and he never reached the speeds he intended.
Piero Taruffi and the wingless aircraft which hid the Gilera Rondine; good enough for 170mph in 1937
It tookJoe Wright on a supercharged OEC-Temple-JAPto beat the BMW's speed, which he barely pipped at 137.32mph down the straightaway at Arpajon, France, just outside the gates of the Montlhéry speed bowl, on Aug 31, 1930. Less than a month later, Henne squeezed another mph from the BMW, and recorded 137.66mph at Ingolstadt, Germany, on Sep 21st. The remainder of the 1930s was a ding-dong battle between a clubby pack of English speed-demons and the might of the BMW factory, interrupted only by the Gilera Rondine snatching glory for a moment in 1937, when Piero Taruffi recorded 170.37mph on the Brescia-Bergamo autostrada.
A 1937 press shot of the Gilera Rondine ‘naked’ in supercharged for as raced pre-war. Post-war, the blower was removed, a new and excellent frame designed, and 5 World Championships were captured
The Brit club included George Brough,Freddie Barnes, and Claude Temple as builder/mentors, and Eric Fernihough and Joe Wright at the brave riders. These gents worked in glorified sheds, squeezing power out of the obsolete (by comparison) JAP pushrod V-twin engine, which they housed in their own chassis (Brough Superior, Zenith, and OEC respectively), and ultimately succeeded in retaining glory, until it was clear 'the competition' would shortly involve guns. The motorcycles they built are magnificent bitsas, masterpieces of handwork and inspiration, cobbled together by men of tremendous passion. Amazingly, almost all of these supercharged record-breakers survive.
Piero Taruffi inside the ‘cockpit’ of the Gilera Rondine with aerodynamic bodywork.
Below is a fantastic '5 minutes' with Piero Taruffi and the Gilera Rondine:
https://youtu.be/iDlJG3DVd6M
The BMW factory, by contrast, worked from a fresh sheet of paper, ultimately designing the RS255 engine for modern racing, integrating a blower to the engine castings, and developing this OHC flat-twin 500cc racer to win both the Isle of Man TT by 1939, and take the ultimate pre-war World Speed Record by 1937, at 173.68mph, which stood for 14 years. The BMW had half the engine capacity of its rivals from England (although the same capacity as the Gilera, which was only 3mph slower), but had the advantage of a modern factory and a team of talented engineers to build this superb machine from scratch. The BMW record-breakers were equally the product of passionate engineers, and are equally masterpieces of speed-inspired design. Amazingly, the BMW and Gilera record-breakers also survive, and all can be enjoyed in person, if you're lucky enough to encounter them. In the past two years, for example the Joe Wright blown Zenith-JAP and OEC-Temple-JAP could be seen at the Vintage Revival Montlhéry, as well as theConcorso di Villa d'Este, where one could also see the BMW WR750 and Gilera Rondine in original condition, and a rebuilt RS255 streamliner ('Henne's Egg'). These machines are reason enough to attend such events, as they leave a lasting impression as the pinnacle of the Golden Age of Supercharging.
Paul d'Orléans is the founder of TheVintagent.com. He is an author, photographer, filmmaker, museum curator, event organizer, and public speaker. Check out his Author Page, Instagram, and Facebook.
The early history of Harley-Davidson in Japan is little known in the West, but the complex relationship with its #2 export market in the 1920s (after Australia) is fascinating. Relations between the Motor Co. and its Japanese subsidiary became very contentious in the 1930s, as the Japan transformed into an aggressive Imperial power, with a militarized, nationalist, and protectionist political system.
Baron Kishichuro Okura, while a student at Trinity College at Cambridge University, entered the very first race at Brooklands in 1907. He drove a 120hp FIAT, and came in 2nd in the race! Okura was the first (unofficial) importer of Harley-Davidsons to Japan. [BritishLibrary]Harley-Davidsons first began trickling into Japan in 1912, when the Japanese Army purchased a small contingent of machines for study, but oddly, they never requested any spares. More machines were ordered in 1922, by the Tokyo import company Nippon Jidoshe KK, headed by Baron Kishichiro Okura, who was among the first to import cars into Japan. Okura spoke excellent English, as he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge: he even participated in the very first automobile race at Brooklands in 1907, where he won 2nd place! Okura's company ordered a few 'J' model Harleys, in 1922 and a few dozen more in the following two years, but also never purchased spares with his bike orders, which confounded the H-D brass. This, plus a large order from Outer Mongolia, also without a spares supplement, spurred H-D to send Alfred Rich Child to sort out the Japanese situation in 1924. One of Harley-Davidson's earliest credos was dealer support and spares availability, and its Japanese dealers were not following the company's guidelines.
Alfred Rich Child in the early 1920s [AMA Hall of Fame Museum]Negotiations with Baron Okura (the semi-official importer) to set up a proper H-D import scheme were a failure, but while in Japan, Child befriended Genjiro Fukui, US-educated and a wealthy founder of the prestigious Sankyo Pharmaceutical Company. Fukui ran an import/export division of Sankyo, the Koto Trading Co., which had been selling 'bootleg' import Harleys, brought into Japan from the Outer Mongolian shipments, and sold under Baron Okura's nose.
Alfred Rich Child and his family in Milwaukee, before heading off to Japan in 1924 [Sucher]Since no love was lost between Child and Okura by this point, and a friendship blossomed between Child and Fukui, and since Fukui's Koto Trading Co. had set up a successful Harley-Davidson import and sales organization, it seemed natural that Alfred Child join forces with Fukui. They set up the Harley Davidson Motorcycle Sales Company of Japan in 1924, with Fukui/Sankyo providing investment capital, and Child as Managing Director, whose 'cut' was 5% of gross sales in Japan. Their initial order included 350 H-Ds, each with a sidecar (three-wheelers having been found extremely useful as utility vehicles in Japan, after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake), plus $20,000 in spares, and $3000 of factory repair tools. As Sankyo already had pharmaceutical contracts with all branches of the Japanese military, Harleys were suddenly required for all manner of police, military, and Imperial Escort duties. The new venture was very successful, selling about 2000 bikes/year.
After the great Tokyo earthquake of 1923, three-wheeled vehicles were the best way to get around Japan's difficult roads and cities, and many manufacturers built special chassis for all manner of passenger and utility machines. This is a ca.1934 Harley Davidson VL 'rear car' [Sucher]In common with the American parent factory, H-D Japan hired professional motorcycle racer Kawamada Kazuo (who later became president of Orient Motors), after Alfred Child watched him win a 350cc race at Naruo in 1925, coming 4th in the 1200cc race on his Harley. "An American came up an hit me on the shoulder. 'Would you like to come and work at the Harley-Davidson sales office?' he asked. I jokingly replied, 'Will you pay me Y100 a month?' but I left for their Tokyo office for a visit anyway. At that time the monthly salary at a private university was Y28...Alfred Child said, 'Depending on your results, we'll pay you Y100 a month,' so I joined the company. A week later I won first prize at Shinshu Matsumoto City Race, riding a 1200cc Harley Davidson, and they did indeed pay me Y100..."
The Harley Davidson 'Rikuo', the Japanese version of the 1200cc Harley-Davidson VL model [Iwatate]After the global economic crash of 1929, the Yen was devalued by half; this combined with new import tariffs made importing any foreign-built vehicle nearly impossible. With the price of Harley Davidsons suddenly more than doubled, Child reasoned the only future for Harley in Japan was to license the outright manufacture of H-Ds to a Japanese company: his company. He sailed in 1929 to Milwaukee, with a representative of the Sankyo Co to discuss a deal, armed with an undisclosed cash payment (reputedly $75,000) from Sankyo. This stunned the Harley-Davidson management, who granted exclusive rights to manufacture H-D bikes and spares in Japan to the HDMSCoJ. That reputed $75,000 payment from Sankyo, in the worst year of the Depression, probably saved Harley-Davidson from bankruptcy, and was a company secret for generations.
A Harley Davidson factory-built racing special, made-for-Japan-only road racer, with 500cc OHV engine. Where is it now? [Sucher]In return for these rights, Childs promised never to sell Japanese-built Harleys or spares outside Japan [The same situation is established by H-D in India today, with H-D factories making bikes in-country, which are never seen in the USA]. Childs brought motorcycle industry veteran and H-D employee Fred Barr with him to Japan, to set up a new factory in Shinagawa (Tokyo), using H-D tooling, processes, and blueprints to build parts and machines to exact specifications. No other Americans were sent, and none were ever employed. Production began in 1932, and no mention was ever made of this unique agreement in the American press, nor was it publicly discussed by Harley Davidson until the 1980s.
Alfred R Child with one of the first EL 'Knucklehead' models imported into Japan in 1936 [Sucher]The first Japanese Harley-Davidsons were built in 1935, the 1200cc Model 'VL', and were branded the Harley Davidson 'Rikuo' (Road King) model. Their #1 customer was the Japanese military, who were rapidly expanding their arsenal under aggressive Imperial politics. Complications emerged in 1936, when H-D sent a prototype Model EL 'Knucklehead' for testing in Japan, and the home factory pressured H-D Japan for higher licensing fees. After test-riding 400 miles on the 'Knuck', Alfred Childs' son Richard felt the machine was unsuitable for the Japanese market, and not ready for production. Sankyo was unhappy with both the licensing pressures and the new bike, so the company sent its New York representative, Mr. Kusanobu, to pay a heavy-handed visit to the H-D Board in Milwaukee. He complained of Childs' 5% commission (which made him a wealthy man) and the increased licensing fees, and insisted Childs be removed from the Board, or Sankyo would cease financing H-D imports into Japan. Not only that, but the existing range of sidevalve machines would now be sold simply as the 'Rikuo', with no more licensing paid to Harley at all. Kusanobu was nearly thrown out on his ear, but he delivered on his threats. In 1936, Rikuo was re-born an independent marque, with no connection to Harley-Davidson, barring its design. As compensation for Childs' loss of a lucrative business, Harley-Davidson made him the exclusive H-D importer for Asia (Japan, Korea, North China, and Manchuria): he had, after all, saved the company's bacon with the 1929 deal.
A Japanese Imperial Navy Rikuo circa 1937, part of the special landing force that took Shanghai. [Vintagent Archive]Of course, Child's new job description didn't last long. With the Japanese military increasing their grip on both government and industry, agreements with foreign companies operating factories on Japanese soil were voided. The military encouraged/supported other factories to make H-D copies, without paying licensing fees to H-D. Japanese companies Kurogane, Aikou, Toko Kogyo, and SSD all produced H-D clones by 1937, with production almost exclusively destined for the military. In August 1937, Japan invaded China, and Alfred R. Child was warned to leave Japan immediately. He might have lost everything, had his friend Mr Fukui not purchased Childs' homes, businesses, and his remaining H-D stock. By 1939, Ford, Chrysler and General Motors were in the same boat, with all American employees forced to leave Japan, their companies effectively nationalized by the military, with no compensation to their American owners. Rikuo produced 18,000 'VL' models through 1942, which is about the same as Harley-Davidson's production of the same model! In 1942, Rikuo switched to making torpedos, but after the war, in 1947, they resumed production of the old 750cc WL sidevalve model, and in 1950 the resumed the 1200cc sidevalver too. Rikuo continued production on these pre-War machine until 1962, when Harley-Davidson once again established a dealership network in Japan.
From the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, several Rikuo sidecar outfits used as machine gun platforms. Note the 1936 registration of the far machine. [Vintagent Archive]Information and photographs for this article were sourced from 3 excellent books:
- 'A Century of Japanese Motorcycles', by Didier Ganneau and Francois-Marie Dumas, which is to date the only comprehensive English-language book covering all years of the Japanese motorcycle industry. Given the market dominance of Japanese motorcycles since the 1960s, this is a remarkable poverty of books, compared to every other nation's motorcycling contribution. Photos scanned from here are listed as (Iwatate). It's a must-own book!
- 'Harley Davidson' by Harry Sucher, for the Rikuo story; the first complete history of the H-D marque, with much info from people who were still alive in the early days. Extremely informative. Photos listed as (Sucher).
The first motorcycle to appear in Japan; a Hildebrand and Wolfmüller, in 1896 (Iwatate)
To understand the slow and chaotic beginning of the Japanese motorcycle industry, it helps to understand a little of the country's background, and history of its relations with the West. Japan was never isolated or ignorant of world affairs, having conducted sea trade for centuries with neighbors in China and Korea, and was well aware in the 1500s that an aggressive colonial expansion by European countries had begun in the New World. When Spanish and Portugese traders arrived on Japanese shores in the late 1500s, the introduction of Catholicism in southern Japan was seen as the spearhead of a possible colonizing effort by Europeans. In response, the Tokugawa shogunate (the feudal military rulers in Edo castle - this is also called the 'Edo period') passed laws starting in 1633 which drastically restricted contact and trade with the outside world, making entry into Japan by foreigners, and exit from Japan by locals, punishable by death. These laws remained in effect until 1868 (230 years!), the end of the Edo period, and the start of the 'Meiji Restoration'. As with all politics, while the colonial threat was the primary excuse for an iron grip on Japanese trade, an important effect was to enrich the Tokugawas and deprive rival feudal groups of trade revenue. Ultimately this unified Japan, and created a national identity.
A contemporary Japanese woodcut depicting one of Commodore Perry's steamships ('Net)
Japan still traded with the outside world, through tightly controlled channels: the sole European access was limited to the artificial island called Dejima, in Nagasaki harbor, where the Dutch East India Company handled imports and exports. All trade with China went through Dejima as well. Trade with Korea, the Ainu people of northern Japan, and the islands of the Ryukyu kingdom (Okinawa etc) were all handled at specific sites. Europeans tried for 200 years to establish relations with Japan by trickery or force, but were successfully repelled until July 8, 1853, when Commodore Mathew Perry brought four US Navy warships (the kurofune, or 'Black Ships') into Tokyo Bay, and broke the resistance of Japanese forces. He returned the following year with 7 warships, and forced the Shogun to sign 'Treaty of Peace and Amity'...classic 'gunboat diplomacy'; the treaty forbade the Japanese from levying tarrifs on trade (although of course the US could), and gave US citizens immunity from prosecution in Japan ('extraterritoriality' - same as in Iraq/Afghanistan today - some things never change). Such treaties were implemented soon after by European countries, a humiliating turn of events which led to the end of the Tokugawa shogunate, which was replaced by the Meiji oligarchy in 1868 [which corresponds to the invention of the motorcycle, in France (the Perraux steam cycle) and the US (the Roper steam velocipede)].
The first railroad opened in Japan in 1872, between Yokohama and Tokyo (Shimbashi) ('Net)
The sudden/forced opening to European influence was embraced by the Meiji government, who saw modernization as the only way to defend Japanese sovereignty and culture. They organized 'learning expeditions' to the US and Europe from the 1870s onwards, where large teams of diplomats and students examined all manner of manufacturing and governmental institutions (military, courts, schools, etc). These missions served Japan well, for within a generation the country had become acknowledged as a modern global power, with a burgeoning industrial base.
Meiji-era advertisement for an American 'Auto-Bi' motorcycle, built by E.R. Thomas.A contemporary photos of an Auto-Bi c.1900, generally considered to be the first production motorcycle in America, by E.R.Thomas in Buffalo, NY. Later the company produced Thomas motorcycles - so Thomas Auto-Bi is the generally accepted name of the brand.
The first motorcycle appeared in Japan in 1896; a Hildebrand and Wolfmüller imported by Shinsuke Jomonji, a member of the Japanese House of Representatives, who demonstrated the machine in front of the Hibiya Hotel in Tokyo (destroyed by earthquake in 1923?). In 1901, a Thomas motorcycle and tricycle were imported, and the motorcycle was ridden extensively through Tokyo, and generated considerable press comment. The first motor vehicle race in Japan was staged between the two Thomas machines and a Gladiator quadricycle, on Nov. 3, 1901. The Thomas is generally considered the first production motorcycle in the US, and its appearance in Japan at this early date is remarkable.
The Thomas Auto-Bi Roadster, Gladiator quadricycle, and Thomas Auto-Tri 3-wheeler, at the first motor vehicle race in Japan, Nov 3 1901
1908 - The First Japanese Motorcycle:
The true pioneer Japanese motorcycle builder was Narazo Shimazu, who established the Shimazu Motor Research Institute in 1908, in Osaka. Using knowledge gleaned from Scientific American and the English book 'Motor Cycling Manual', he built his first gasoline-powered engine in August 1908, a two-stroke single-cylinder of 400cc, and installed it into a home-built frame from salvaged bicycles (there being no raw tubing available) - the first entirely Japanese-built motorcycle
The first Japanese motorcycle; the NS, built by Narazo Shimazu in 1908, in Osaka (Iwatate)
In 1913, Eisuke Miyata, founder of a gun and bicycle firm (in 1892 - 'Miyata' is still making bicycles today), purchased a Triumph and made a faithful copy as the 'Asahi' motorcycle, which was used by the Tokyo police and for gov't minister escort duty, despite its 180yen price. The Japanese motorcycle industry had truly begun, although there was as yet no unified highway code in Japan, and inter-urban roads were terrible. Urban roads were worse, as Japanese cities were intentionally built in a crazy-quilt pattern during their Feudal period, to slow the advance of invading troops. A lack of road signs and even street names, combined with the horrific state of road repair, made the advance of motorization difficult. Japan had never relied on horse and carts for general movement of goods in their Feudal period, and almost all traffic was by foot.
The Miyata-built 'Asahi' of 1913; virtually a replica of a Triumph (Iwatate)
Narazo Shimazu returned to the motorcycle business in 1926, producing the 'Arrow First', a 250cc sidevalve single-cylinder, and after 6 were built, he embarked on a well-publicized across-Japan moto-tour, sponsored by Japan Oil, Dunlop, and Bosch. Six riders, on four red motorcycles, took a 15-day ride of 1430 miles from Kagoshima to Tokyo. The publicity drew the attention of the Ohayashi group of companies, which whom Shimazu founded Japan Motors Manufacturing. He improved the 'Arrow First', and eventually sold 700 over the next 3 years, before the business went bust.
Escorting Prince Hirohito with a ca.1926 Harley Davidson 'J' with sidecar...but the Prince had his own Indian! ('Net
The first motorcycle race in Japan was held in 1913, at the Hanshin Racecourse, a dirt horse racing track in Nishinomiya (near Kobe). Around 30,000 spectators attended, a record for any kind of race in Japan. Racing became more common at venues across the country, and professional riders emerged, such as Kawamada Kazuo (who worked for Alfred Child at Harley Davidson Japan - see below) and the remarkable Kenzo Tada, the first Japanese rider to compete at the Isle of Man TT, in 1930, aboard a Velocette KTT. [Read more on Kenzo Tada here]
Kenzo Tada and his Velocette KTT on the Isle of Man in 1930 (Clew)
Just like the United States after WW2, it was the need for military mobility which sped up infrastructure improvement for Japanese roads. An increasingly belligerent Japanese military (annexing Taiwan in 1895, and parts of China and Korea by 1910) used motorized vehicles in greater numbers than the rest of the country. By 1919, a unified highway code was established along British lines (meaning they drive on the left), and civilian contractors hired to improve roads and bridges, while the military was allowed to subsidize vehicle manufacture at home.
March 1926; winners of the Shizuoka Championship. K.Nose (BSA Super Sports), Matsumoto (H-D single-cylinder), and Kawabata (New Imperial) (Iwatate)
During the 1920s, Japanese textiles were driving their export market, and increased prosperity meant more imports of motorcycles. Harley Davidson's #2 global export market in the 1920s was Japan (after Australia), and Indian sold just as many (around 1000/year), including to Prince (later Emperor) Hirohito, who enjoyed riding an Indian Chief with sidecar. Henderson four-cylinders were also sold in Japan, and manufacturers from Britain (AJS, Matchless, Norton, Douglas, Brough Superior, and Velocette), Belgium (Saroléa and FN), plus Husqvarna, Moto Guzzi, NSU and BMW exported to Japan as well. The Road Improvement Plan of 1920 estimated a 30-year project of completely paving Japanese roads, and building bridges over rivers, and the motorcycle as a pleasurable touring machine for wealthy riders became a reality. Motorcycle clubs sprung up, some of which forbade riders to venture alone due to the terrible state of roads, and a culture of tonori('riding far') grew.
An advertisement for Belgian Saroléa motorcycles, ca.1926 (Iwatate)
A massive earthquake destroyed much of Tokyo in 1923, killing hundreds of thousands, and the utter lack of motorized emergency vehicles, plus the impossibility of the road system for efficient rescue/reconstruction work, meant big changes for the Japanese vehicle industry, and the roads they used. Tokyo was rebuilt with a more rational road system, which doubled the number of vehicles in a single year (1924), and led to a push country-wide for a modernized road system. To further promote the nascent Japanese vehicle industry, import tariffs were imposed on foreign vehicles in 1925, which led Ford (1924), General Motors ('27), and Chrysler ('29) to establish factories in Japan. Harley-Davidson followed suit in 1929.
An Indian Chief and BSA 'Sloper', touring in Japan ca.1934 (Iwatate)
Several small motorcycle manufacturers set up shop in the mid-1920s, including the 350cc two-stroke Sanda ('Thunder') from Osaka, the SSD of Hiroshima, and the grand-daddy of them all, a 1200cc twin called the Giant, built by Count Katsu Kiyoshi in 1924. The Japan Automobile Company (JAC) produced motorcycles starting in 1929, which included 350cc and 500cc sidevalve singles, and a 500cc v-twin on JAP lines. In 1931 JAC built about 30 examples of 1200cc flat-twin, used for Imperial escort duty. Between the late 1920s and 1937, when the military effectively commanded all civilian vehicle production, quite a few large manufacturers had firmly established themselves in the Japanese market. Maruyama, Toyo (Mazda), Meguro, Cabton, Showa, Miyata, and Rikuo. Miyata alone produced nearly 30,000 motorcycles between 1930-45, and as mentioned, Rikuo built some 18,000 heavyweight H-D clones between 1935-42.
A sporting Meguro 500cc OHV model of the late 1930s (taken postwar with a US Marine) ('Net)
Information and photographs for this article were sourced from 3 excellent books:
- 'A Century of Japanese Motorcycles', by Didier Ganneau and Francois-Marie Dumas, which is to date the only comprehensive English-language book covering all years of the Japanese motorcycle industry. Given the market dominance of Japanese motorcycles since the 1960s, this is a remarkable poverty of books, compared to every other nation's motorcycling contribution. Photos scanned from here are listed as (Iwatate). It's a must-own book!
- 'Harley Davidson' by Harry Sucher, for the Rikuo story; the first complete history of the H-D marque, with much info from people who were still alive in the early days. Extremely informative. Photos listed at (Sucher).
Lady racer (?) on a Sarolea Model 23M Sports. Note 'Gargoyle' sweater - they imported Mobil oil products (Iwatate
The romance of the place is captured in the name, redolent of the invisible goals of speed. El Mirage is nominally a town in the SoCal desert, nearest Palmdale, which is itself nearly nowhere, even though inhabited by many thousands. Its raison d'etre is a dry lake bed, now bounded by the El Mirage Off-Highway-Vehicle Recreation Area, under the purview of the Bureau of Land Management.
Shinya Kimura with his long-time salt flats racer, a Harley-Davidson Knucklehead custom named 'The Spike'
The lake bed is very nearly flat, with a cracked mud surface occasionally pockmarked by potholes, but with nothing of the inches-tall cracqueleure of Bonneville, nor its corrosive salt crust. El Mirage lacks Bonneville's pristinely bizarre beauty, and its relative cleanliness - as vehicles pound the miles of dried dirt to reach the SCTA timing camp, clouds of sepia dust trail them, as it does the high speed vehicles racing across its surface. The effect is dramatic and beautiful, but layers everything and everyone nearby with an ultrafine grit. While some vehicles used air cleaners while racing, others take their chances gulping in the powder, and never need worry about bedding in their piston rings.
The full view of Willy's Lakester - a vision of a past Future, painted an unusual shade of mauve, supposedly a works Bugatti racing color
November 13th, 2015, became an infamous day for more nefarious reasons, but it was my first visit to the place, and I reveled in its spare beauty, and the fantastic characters who temporarily populate its puzzle-cracked earth. The goal was to explore, and take a few wet plate photos, which was accomplished. As the racing is over a weekend, not a week as in Bonneville, there's no 'village' feeling, and the layout of disparate camps is chaotic, making introductions difficult. Everyone is busy racing, and while very friendly, its hardly a relaxed place to take photos. Thanks to the several people who took time for my work, I hope you enjoy the results. See more at MotoTintype.com
Alp Sungurtekin, who exceeded 175mph on his home-built pre-unit Triumph, featured previously on TheVintagent.Coming soon to Intersection magazine; a few shots of the Vintagent at work at El Mirage, thanks to photographer Gilles, captured here at George's junkyard, beside a familiar RenaultA closeup of the remarkable aesthetic ingenuity built into The SpikeShinya Kimura's longtime dry-lakes racer the 'Spike'Willy with a breed unique to the SCTA - the Belly Tank Lakester. Built from a discarded aircraft fuel tank, this is a genre unique to dry lakes racing in SoCal. This one used a Ford flathead V8 motor, and sounded amazing.Alp's crew chief, Jalika, who betrays her former career as a fashion model
Occasionally a great talent slips completely off the radar of design aficionados, due to a lack of available historic materials, or lack of work in translated into English, or a simple lack of recent press. The work of Louis Lucien Lepoix (1918-1998) is such, one of a few unsung visionary designers whose ideas and efforts were far in advance of the motorcycle industry. His ideas for streamlining and rider protection weren't embraced by the industry for decades, and many still look modern, or at least like a future we'd still like to see. His son Bertrand oversaw the creation of a 550-page tome on Lepoix's ouevre, published after his death in 1998, from which these photos are taken.
Louis Lucien Lepoix and his spectacular, futuristic bodywork for his BMW R12 [Lepoix Family Archive]Lepoix was born Feb.4, 1918 in Giromagny, France, to a very poor family. He studied industrial design and architecture in Lyon and Paris, continuing his studies with a degree in engineering. After WW2, he worked in Germany at Dornier Flugzeugwerke (makers of interesting aircraft, etc) and ZF Friedrichshafen (still in business making ZF gearboxes etc) whose director Dr. Albert Meier designed a small car chassis that Lepoix clad in shapely bodywork, to much acclaim.
Lepoix's pre-War sketch for his modern motorcycle design [Lepoix Family Archive]During the war, Lepoix, passionate about streamlined vehicles, sketched quite a few cars, motorcycles, and planes with futuristic curvy body styles and flowing lines. His son Bertrand claims that Louis Lucien Lepoix, who spoke no English, had no knowledge of the work of Raymond Loewy or Norman Bel Geddes, icons of the school of streamlining whose work for automotive, aircraft, and rail companies defined the ideals of an era. Their streamlined designs embodied the hope that the age of war, disease, and conflict would end with a coming age of Modernity.
Lepoix's 1937 'Air Car' [Lepoix Family Archive]An example of Lepoix's thinking is this 'Air Concept Car', drawn up in 1942-3, with seating for 7, and a clear emphasis on a low coefficient of drag. The general shape of the vehicle recalls Buckminster Fuller's 'Dymaxion Car', patented in 1937 (and revised in 1943), and the concept is identical - low drag equals high speed and efficiency, an aircraft for tarmac. The benefit of lower fuel consumption would have been very much on the mind of any automotive designer during WW2, given the fuel rationing imposed on all combatant nations, with eventual shortages as the war intensified. Fuller's Dymaxion was reputed to achieve 120mph and give 30mph - terrific for '37 - but the project was ultimately scuttled due to a fatal accident while the car was being tested...while a brilliant engineer, perhaps Fuller's ideas were ahead of their time as regards safety and stability. It wouldn't be sacrilege to suggest the same fate would befall the 'Air Concept Car'.
Rear view of the BMW R12 special showing its sweeping, integrated lines, and the original pressed-steel frame of the BMW beneath [Lepoix Family Archive]In 1947, Lepoix founded his own design atelier, initially focussing on two-wheeled projects, beginning with this amazingly futuristic bodywork for his 1934ish BMW R12, a 750cc sidevalve flat-twin with pressed-steel frame, which was considered quite stylish, with a bit of Art Deco flair. Lepoix purchased the BMW at an auction organized by the French military in Baden Baden, Germany (French HQ in occupied Germany at the time) and set about to completely revamp the bodywork, but not the structure of the BMW. Lepoix was a keen motorcycle enthusiast, and began work on his motorcycle with a brief to address the issue of a rider's exposure to the elements (cold hands, knees, and feet!), while making a statement about the Future. He had been working on drawings and models of his concepts during the war, and his sketches plus a hand-carved model motorcycle survive today.
Another view of the BMW special (note the BMW's original brakes and fork shrouds are incorporated) [Lepoix Family Archive]The finished result is spectacular, modernistic, and very stylish, if a bit heavy-looking. Very few motorcycles before 1947 had explored the concept of full streamlining of the motorcycle, and even more rare was consideration for the rider; in fact, it would be another 7 years before the Vincent factory introduced their Black Prince model, which was the first fully enclosed and faired (ie, the bodywork protected the rider with an aerodynamic, wind-cheating design) production motorcycle. To be sure, quite a few motorcycles built for speed records were designed with a full enclosure (Gilera, BMW, Brough-Superior, DKW, etc), but these were never meant for the road. Lepoix was in tune with the streamlining ideas of his time, and just that bit ahead of the curve in actually building a motorcycle with weather protection for the rider, so early after the War.
Sketches for 'Feet Forward' motorcycles using unit-construction two-stroke engines [Lepoix Family Archive]Remarkably, his sketches from the War years also include a totally aerodynamic Feet-First design, which predates the rage for this type of motorcycle (and bicycle) by fully 30 years! Very few FF designs like this were produced prior to 1943, although hub-center steered machines with 'tankless' seating positions were built as early as the Veteran period by Wilkinson ('09), Ner-A-Car ('19) [read our Road Test here]. The Ro-Monocar ('26) came closest to realizing an enclosed 'car on wheels' - the stated aspiration of so many designers. The Monocar has the clunky bodywork of a cheap saloon vehicle, but the seeds of the idea were sown. It's a shame Lepoix didn't have a Majestic [read our Road Test here] or Ner-A-Car at hand to modify, and realize his vision of a curvaceous and appealing body style with a proper hub-center chassis.
A sketch of the Horex prototype, built along the same lines as the BMW [Lepoix Family Archive]His later career was very busy, and occupied with cars, agricultural machinery, heavy truck cabs, aircraft, and a host of modernistic smaller designs (telephones, household appliances, etc). He was also busy designing motorcycles as late as the 1970s, for Kreidler, Hercules, Horex, Puch, Maico, Triumph, Bastert and Walba. According to the family, Louis L. Lepoix's 50-year career "included more than 3000 products, including around 300 vehicles." If he'd lived just a bit longer, his styling acumen could have vastly improved the 'plastic era' of motorcycling: the bodywork of modern motorcycles went through a long period without much sex appeal, and a man with Lepoix's flair might have produced bodywork with curvaceous sensuality superior to mass-produced four-cylinder appliances.
A 1950s catalog for the Maico Mobil, one design of Lepoix's that became famous for its rounded, universally appealing shape. [The Vintagent Archive]The Bastert scooter was another Lepoix design, built in very limited numbers. Only about 1200 Bastert scooters were produced from 1950, with all-aluminum bodywork and advanced technical specification. They are very highly sought after today, as they embody the best of Lepoix's design sense, and look stylishly aggressive even today. This machine was captured at the 2017 Concorso Villa d'Este. [Paul d'Orléans]The 1952 Bugatti Type 101, with bodywork designed by Lepoix. [Wikepedia]An even more spectacular set of bodywork on a Horex 400cc Regina, which sadly does not seem to have survived. [Lepoix Family Archive]
Paul d'Orléans is the founder of TheVintagent.com. He is an author, photographer, filmmaker, museum curator, event organizer, and public speaker. Check out his Author Page, Instagram, and Facebook.
When Georges Roy set out to combine the best qualities of an automobile with the thrills of a motorcycle, he created a remarkable machine – the Majestic. It’s the ultimate French Art Deco motorcycle, as his design enabled a free hand to create stylish, stunning bodywork over a radical chassis. The Majestic was revolutionary in 1929, and the ideas Georges Roy made into metal are still being explored by motorcycle designers.
Georges Roy himself with a prototype of his New Motorcycle. Love his riding kit! And the fishtail exhaust tips. [Private Collection]Roy’s first production machine was the ‘New Motorcycle’ of 1928, which used a pressed-steel monocoque chassis, rather than a tube frame. Roy was among the first industrial designers to grapple with mass-production techniques for auto manufacture, in which huge presses stamp out bodywork by the tens of thousands, very cheaply. Conventional motorcycle production with the bicycle-derived tube frame is labor intensive and expensive, and Roy correctly understood that inexpensive pressings could form the chassis of a motorcycle, including the frame, forks, and tanks.
Details of the New Motorcycle, showing its pressed-steel chassis. [Private Collection]
The catalog cover for the 1928 New Motorcycle, with Georges Roy aboard. [Private Collection]The monocoque concept was sound, and eventually became the norm in the automotive industry (called ‘unibody’ construction from the 1960s), although it’s rarely used on motorcycles. Pressed-steel frame parts, on the other hand, are absolutely the norm today, and the most popular motorcycle in the world, the Honda Super Cub with over 90 Million produced in 14 countries since 1958, uses pressed-steel forks, frame parts, and rear fender. The later C110 Sports Cub is also still in production (since 1960), and features a full monocoque frame of welded-up pressed-steel frame halves. Clearly, Roy's ideas were sound, and today, frame production is possible on a mass scale, very cheaply, using the ideas he explored. The New Motorcycle was hand-built and riveted together; robot welders and painters had yet to be invented, existing only as science fiction in 1928!
The Majestic
The original Majestic prototype used a Cleveland four-cylinder engine in a different chassis than the production models. [Private Collection]
The world soon caught up with George Roy’s concept, and even staid BMW produced motorcycles using a pressed-steel monocoque chassis from 1930-35. So Roy moved even further from the mainstream, exhibiting a prototype for a totally new design called the Majestic at the Paris Motor Show in 1929. The Majestic was in some ways retrograde from the New Motorcycle, as it uses a conventional automotive-type chassis with hub-center steering, technology that was old news by 1929. The industry had already seen the Ner-A-Car of the early 1920s, and even the Zenith Auto-Bi of 1907, among other hub-center steered bikes.
The full article introducing the Majestic to the public; MotorCycling, July 10, 1929. [MotorCycling]What differentiated the Majestic from earlier efforts was its totally enveloping bodywork; swooping pressed steel panels with unbroken lines from its beak-like nose to the sporting abbreviated tail. The sweeping curves of the design make the Majestic a brilliant Art Deco sculpture, and was made possible by the use of automotive ‘coachbuilding’ practice – placing a bespoke body onto a standardized chassis – for the first time on a motorcycle.
The tapering body and swells over the wheels are clearly visible; a stylish and elegant beast. [Paul d’Orléans]The chassis is constructed using two mirror-image side rails of square-section steel, which are joined by riveted cross members. Firewalls at the front and back of the engine are also riveted to the frame, with strengthening panels beneath the engine, plus the two large, fixed top panels. The whole structure is extremely rigid, yet very light. The rest of the bodywork is attached to thse fixed points, including the nose and tail sections, and the central engine covers, which are removable for engine access, and stylishly louvered for airflow, to keep the engine cool. The bodywork is thin-gauge steel pressed into shape, so the overall weight of the machine is fairly low, around 350lb with a single-cylinder Chaise OHV motor inside.
The fabulous, symmetric instrument panel on the Majestic's handlebars. This is the most elaborate version; some Majestics had far simple panels, or none at all. [Paul d’Orléans]The question of ‘what engine’, given an empty engine compartment, is open – the original Majestic prototype was built with an American 4-cylinder Cleveland engine! Other engines included Chaise and JAP single-cylinder engines, or a JAP v-twin mounted transversely. The fuel tank sits under the front bulkhead, and the instruments sat in a binnacle on the handlebars - in this case, a clock, speedo, and multi-position light switch. Conventional controls operate the machine, including a hand-shifter, which is a simple rotary device with a knob - no 'gate' for holding the lever in place, just a round boss with Roman numerals indicating the gear (there are III).
The Art Deco style of the 1930 Majestic catalog. [Private Collection]The steering and front suspension uses vertical rods for sprung movement (or ‘sliding pillars’ if you know Morgan sports cars), and a steering rod is connected between the handlebars and the central hub. The inside of the hub is complicated, as it incorporates very large bearings, the swiveling steering mechanism, and the front brake.
A Majestic is striking from every angle, and cast a long shadow on the design world. [Paul d’Orléans]The Majestic was an expensive, elegant machine, a true Grand Routier in French parlance, and could be ordered in several colors, or even an ‘alligator’ finish, which was hand-applied by very skilled artisans of the Guild of Decorative Painters. There is no other motorcycle built with such a paint finish, which far exceeds the skills of even the best coach-painter; it’s an artisanal and labor-intensive technique, using an inherently unstable process. The 'crackling' is created by using a fast-drying top paint layer over an incompatible 'base' paint coat. As the top layer dries, it shrinks and cracks into an alligator-like skin. That several Majestics have survived 90 years with this unusual paint scheme speaks well of the artisan’s skills.
A short-chassis 1930 Majestic; there were 2 chassis types available. [Private Collection]
The Road Test
The Majestic is clearly a different breed, and we approached the machine with curiosity and a trace of awe. After a short tutorial on the function of various knobs and switches, a quick sit astride the machine brings no sense there’s anything unusual going on. Except there are no forks to guide you; one is atop a totally enclosed vehicle with hub-center steering, and only the handlebars and extensive instrument panel can be seen from the perch. Starting the Chaise 350cc engine of our test machine was a doddle, and after a prod, a typical 1920's bonk emerges from the fishtail muffler. There was a slight valve clatter below the perforated engine covering, with no tank between rider and motor to muffle it. Not obtrusive, but noticeable.
Suitable for clergy! A priest on a Majestic. [Private Collection]Moving onto the road, the steering becomes very light, with no inertial sluggishness in changing direction, which might be expected for such a long machine. As the speed rises to the 30-40mph range, there’s a mid pendulum effect at the front wheel, as if it’s seeking to find balance, so a light hand is required on the handlebars to prevent a weave. Even with a delicate touch, the front wheel seems very slightly aimless - not hunting exactly, but not rail-like in steering; constant minor correction is necessary to keep the plot moving in exactly the right direction. That was the only unusual effect of the Majestic’s steering, which was still surprising, as other hub-center steered machines tend towards over-stability, and are difficult to deflect from a straight line! It might well be that Georges Roy chose his front end geometry to avoid exactly that tendency, and to keep the Majestic feeling agile rather than rock-steady.
The slimness of the design is clear from the front; it's little wider than a conventional single-cylinder motorcycle, and much narrower than a transverse 4. [Paul d’Orléans]The front suspension worked well, and the length of the machine meant bumps weren’t an issue at all. The Chaise engine isn’t especially powerful, so high-speed testing wasn’t possible, but as the throttle was wound back, the Majestic felt more stable than at ‘town’ speeds. The motor clattered away beneath the perforated steel cover, and the exhaust note was typical of the 1920s, with a tinny bonk from the silencer. At no point did the bodywork rattle or vibrate, and the whole machine felt completely solid, but in no way heavy.
The 'craqueleure' or alligator finish, an artisanal paint process requiring great skill. This example was spotted in the M2R museum in Andorra [Vincent Prat]The Majestic was, as Georges Roy said, a ‘new motorcycle’, and an extremely forward-thinking design. He attempted to build an 'ideal' motorcycle, which was a fascination before WW2, when all things were possible. His ideal was taken up time and again over the ensuing decades, with many small shops and even Yamaha and Bimota taking up the hub-center flag. It’s a ‘better’ system than conventional forks in many ways, except that motorcyclists are a very conservative lot. Far-seeing enthusiasts in the 1920s knew enclosed motorcycles were the future...and how right they were, decades ahead of time.
The hub-center steering mechanism in plain view, showing the steering rod connected to the curved steering arm. The brake plate is on the other side of the hub. [Paul d’Orléans]A luxurious Bernardet sidecar makes a perfect complement to a 1930 Majestic [Yesterdays]Access to the engine bay is easy with the top panel folded away. The Chaise 350cc OHV motor and Amac carburetor are visible and accessible. [Paul d’Orléans]How they're built today; a pair of replica Majestic chassis, showing clearly the contruction. Two mirror-image side rails, held together with riveted cross-members, strengthened by floorpans, and two bulkeads front and rear. The 'arms' extending forward hold the front wheel. [Private Collection]Side view of the remarkable Majestic-Bernardet sidecar outfit; the height of French Art Deco elegance [Yesterdays]
Paul d'Orléans is the founder of TheVintagent.com. He is an author, photographer, filmmaker, museum curator, event organizer, and public speaker. Check out his Author Page, Instagram, and Facebook.
