This famous photograph by Michel Monteange shows the pit crew of the Gauthier and Schaller team at the 1969 Bol d’Or endurance motorcycle race held at the Autodrome de Linas-Montlhéry just outside of Paris. The most immediately noticeable element in the image is the cigarette hanging from the mouth of the no-nonsense chap in the…
The Harley-Davidson Sportster Street Tracker The Harley-Davidson Sportster Street Tracker is by far the best American motorcycle that isn’t actually in production. Custom motorcycle garages like XTR Pepo make light work of turning a stock Sportster into a handsome, nimble, and fast street tracker – but the Harley-Davidson factory in Milwaukee has been very slow…
This Honda ATC70 three wheeler was sent from the American Honda Motor Company to the Jackson 5 – 6255 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California on the 3rd of April 1973. The Jackson 5 and Michael Jackson in particular had a well-known love for motorcycles and there are many period images of the family riding bikes…
Valespeed Motorcycles 28 Days Later is a custom GasGas built by Valespeed Motorcycles, a one-man operation run by a friendly Brit named Ben who’s based out of Worcestershire in the UK. Ben’s last build was a land speed racing motorcycle that set three class records at the Pendine Sands in South Wales in 2016 –…
The Harley-Davidson JDH Twin-Cam The Harley-Davidson JDH Twin-Cam is one of the most celebrated motorcycles ever built by the Milwaukee-based manufacturer. The 74 cubic inch V-twin featured twin cams with two lobes on each, rather than the older set-up that used a single cam with 4 lobes. This reduced the reciprocating weight and reduced the length of…
Cytech Motorcycles have been organizing African motorcycle expeditions since the mid-1970s, they’ve only ever used BMWs because of their legendary toughness and reliability, and over the decades they became one of the largest BMW dealerships in Southern Africa. The company is largely a family affair, Donovan does much of the hands on work with his…
When you see the Watkins M001 for the first time you spend a good 5 minutes staring, trying to wrap your mind around it. It’s equal parts complex, unusual, and unfamiliar, almost as if a motorcycle from the Blade Runner universe was modified in the Marvel universe, before somehow exiting a wormhole and landing on…
The Moto Rocker was designed to be the first “motorcycle” for aspiring riders between the ages of 1.5 and 4 years. The Moto Rocker has a model engine mounted amidships that resembles a 125cc two-stroke unit, with a carburetor, exhaust, and even a unit transmission. Three major versions are offered, a Cafe Racer, Brat Racer,…
The story of Elspeth Beard is legendary within the motorcycle community, in 1982 aged just 23 she set off on a round the world adventure with nothing more than a tent, some meagre savings from her job in a bar, and her trusty 1974 BMW R60/6. This was many years before GPS, email, cell phones,…
The idea of developing a home-built kit to convert the KTM 990 Adventure into a two-wheel drive motorcycle with hub-centre steering sounds difficult enough – but somehow also managing to reduce the weight by 40 kilograms compared to the stock bike sounds borderline impossible. Despite the litany of difficulties associated with the concept, mechanical engineer…
The Triumph Scrambler was first released in 2006, it was based on the already popular Triumph Bonneville, but it added a series of modifications to give it some off-road ability. Not off-road ability on the level of an enduro or motocross racer of course, but enough dirt road capability to have adventures down fire roads and up the occasional forest trail.
The Coventry-Eagle Flying-8 was a high-performance motorcycle designed to compete directly with the offerings from Brough-Superior – a company that was building the fastest and most expensive production motorcycles in the world at the time. The similarity in looks between the Coventry-Eagle Flying-8 and the Brough-Superior SS80 and SS100 was no mistake, George Brough and…
