Features

While taking part in a French motorcycling event, Ian Kerr stumbles across a charming motorcycle museum in the historic town of Entrevaux. The annual five-day Drailles event, run by the Moto Club Senas Durance that’s based in the town of the same name in Provence in the South of France, celebrated its seventh birthday this…

Continue reading »

John Edwards tells the story of a Triton dream – with a Norton Dominator rolling chassis that cost £16 and an engine from a 1953 sprung-hub Triumph Tiger 100 whose owner parted with the whole bike for a fiver! As a coffee-bar cowboy in the early Sixties, I loved the look of the BSA Gold…

Continue reading »

Perran Newman hadn’t swung a leg over a motorcycle in more than 20 years when a friend invited him to try four of his vintage machines along with a modern BMW for comparison – and here he recounts the experience. As I enter my 72nd year, it’s 22 years since I last rode a bike…

Continue reading »

Mick Payne wonders whether it will ever be possible for anyone to produce a truly definitive list of every sidecar manufacturer in history. Who remembers the column NAIT? It stood for ‘Not Appearing in Tragatsch’ and was a regular piece on the marques that slipped beyond the radar of Erwin Tragatsch when compiling his Illustrated…

Continue reading »

We all remember our first solo motorcycle ride, and lifelong motorcyclist John Edwards recalls the excitement and euphoria of his own, on a side-valve 500cc 16H Norton that he bought for a heady £7 in 1958! Apart from some fun in a local park on my friend’s 32cc Cyclemaster-powered bicycle in 1957, I actually learned…

Continue reading »

Nigel Stennett-Cox visits a motorcycle museum whose exhibits are crammed into old railway buildings in North Norfolk. If you appreciate the quirky and different, you’ll love a visit to the Norfolk Motorcycle Museum, for I cannot conceive of another such establishment being quite like it – certainly nowhere else than such a remote and rural…

Continue reading »

Many of us have known that there are various problems that can occur when running a classic vehicle on modern fuel. Dave Manning looks for the facts behind the rumours. When crude oil was first being refined to create kerosene for lamps, back in the 19th century, petroleum was something of a by-product with no…

Continue reading »

Colin Rider tells the story of two identical Ariel Golden Arrows that were bought simultaneously by brothers Derek and Randal Jessop after trading in the BSA Shooting Star that they had shared You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, so the saying goes, and never was this more apparent than between my lifelong friend…

Continue reading »

Steve Cooper looks into the origins and development of the bike that spawned a new genre It’s genuinely debatable as to whether any other motorcycle has polarised riders quite as much as Honda’s Goldwing. Perceived by many at its launch as a wholly unnecessary answer to a question that no one had ever, ever, asked…

Continue reading »

The Mortons Archive contains a precious collection of glass-plate photographic images from the Isle of Man TT races going back to the 1920s, and this June issue seemed the most appropriate in which to show them. All appeared in a book entitled Classic Images, Isle of Man TT Races, with captions by Richard Rosenthal, that…

Continue reading »