Features

Many years after parting with his last, lamented M21, Mr Wilson is once more a contented soul. Sometimes, the classic motorcycle planets do appear to align. Looking back over a lifetime’s riding, of all the British bikes I had owned, I found the only one I really regretted having let go a dozen years before,…

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Geert de Boer adjusts the throttle lever on the right handlebar to three-quarters open, closes the air lever, floods the carburettor and sets the magneto lever on the left bar to nearly full advance. Then he rolls his bike forward as he turns the coffee grinder handle on the left side of the petrol tank…

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Lovely 1957 picture of Roy and Doreen touring on the Triumph. Here, they’re at Land’s End. I didn’t regret selling the Tiger One-Ten at the time,” says Hampshire enthusiast Roy Houghton, speaking of the Triumph he’d bought new in 1956. “I wanted a car so the bike had to go, it was as simple as…

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Sunbeam Model 9, dating to 1927, being ridden stylishly by Luca Boccardo. Kork Ballington drifted his 1981 lime green Kawasaki KR500 around the outside of Danilo Gardella’s Ducati Mike Hailwood Rep, and accelerated out of the horse-shoe shaped Parabolica before disappearing through the double-right turns that lead to the start-finish straight. But Danilo didn’t mind…

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Every picture tells a story, right? So, here we have the start of a race and Giacomo Agostini, on the MV, right, is streaking away into an unassailable lead, probably on his way to a comfortable, record-breaking victory in another world championship year. Well, it was a championship year for Agostini – but apart from…

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There is nobody alive today that is as passionate about racing Rudges as Mervyn Stratford – he has been campaigning the same 1934 four-valve 250 for nearly 50 years. If you saw him stand alongside his Rudge, you might think it was impossible for anyone so tall to get the best out of such a…

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Percy Tait (AJS) streaks round a right-hand corner. It came as an unwelcome surprise to some road race fans when it was revealed that a sizeable bunch of top riders including Maurice Cann, Bob Keeler, Derek Farrant and the young John Surtees would not be making an appearance at the Crystal Palace circuit for the…

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The compact dimensions of the riding position are clear to see. Most motorcycle design doesn’t represent a two-wheeled expression of design trends manifested in the world at large. But occasionally something surfaces that goes against that convention, as a look at the recently restored American four-cylinder Henderson motorcycle created by O. Roy Courtney in 1935…

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