Features
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Small but strong
The BSA C11 was a solid, workmanlike motorcycle, possessing many of the attributes of its bigger brethren, presented in a pint-sized package. Mike Tottey’s first bike was a BSA C11 rather like the one he’s just restored, but this is no tale of an epic mission to recreate a long-lost first love. “No,” he admits,…
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UneXpected pleasure
A big, overweight, wobbly sidecar tug, right? Well, no, that’s not what the late Matchless Model X is at all. When the Matchless Model X was significantly redesigned for the 1937 season, it gained a new name too – the Sports Tourist. Despite the fact that by the fashion of the day, a side-valve V-twin…
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Portway promenade
Lovely period photograph, from June 1933, of motorcyclists and their machines lined on the Portway, Bristol. ‘… the fine concrete road and promenade running beside the river Avon in the deep Avon Gorge at Clifton, a suburb of Bristol.’ The Motor Cycle reported; “It would have been a more attractive venue, from a scenic point…
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A question of sport
When thinking of a sport to combine with football (or soccer to our American friends) the petrol-fuelled revelry of motorcycling hardly seems conducive, but motorcycle football really was all the rage in the 1920s, 30s and even beyond, with crowds flocking to watch the beautiful game played on motorcycles. A question of sport The bizarre…
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Pretty special
This attractive 500cc replica of a Production TT winner started life as a 350cc Viper. Pretty special Wrapped up against the cold, Colin Archer exercises his motorcycle. Bombing along the wide empty roads of the Mendips with my head tucked behind the Velocette’s race screen, it needed little imagination to transport my mind back to…
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Trying times
Have you ever been to a museum and wanted to ‘have a go’ on the exhibits? Now, the National Motorcycle Museum has decided to allow that to happen. Trying times Nottingham man Clive Osman had come along to sample the older machines, though he wasn’t a complete novice to the game, having ridden a couple…
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Motorcycles dominate at the Land’s End Trial
Previously an event favoured equally by those of the two-, three- and four-wheeled persuasion, the 1953 Land’s End Trial was one in which the motorcycles took centre stage. Motorcycles dominate at the Land’s End Trial C R Bell (Ariel) trundles determinedly across Darracott. Those behind him would be caught in a small snowstorm that thankfully…
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Vitesse with finesse
An exhaustive search led to the resurrection of an incredibly rare, but quite fabulous, model. Vitesse with finesse Though it has taken an awful lot of hard work and effort to construct, Gernot isn’t afraid to use his Super Vitesse. Gernot Schuh is nuts about New Hudson. The 45-year-old Austrian bought the first of his…
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The story of the Ormonde
Modern literature often relates the decline of the British and continental motorcycle industry in the 1950s and 1960s. Arguably the rot set in before the First World War. The story of the Ormonde With the explosion of cycling during the late Victorian and early Edwardian days, leading to huge businesses yielding gargantuan profits, it is…
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Crash, bang, wallop…
A tangle of Nortons at Brooklands in 1927. Crash, bang, wallop… Though Brooklands endured sustained popularity as a venue for record-breaking and high-speed machine proving, it was never really a place that provided much spectator enjoyment and in consequence, crowds numbers were always small – succinctly described in Motor Cycling of October 12, 1927, as…
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