Retrobike #26 AUTUMN 2017

23,000 kilometres over four months on a 1959 Velocette" I MET Stuart Hooper at Speed Week on Lake Gairdner last year, as he prepared The World’s Fastest Velocette for what would be a record-shattering 193mph run. That’s 310km/h in the new money, on a pushrod Pommy single! Stuart’s bike is every bit as inventive and personal as was Burt Munro’s World’s Fastest Indian, which inspired it. Burt was fond of saying that if you didn’t follow through on your dreams, you might as well be a vegetable. No chance of that happening with Stuart Hooper. A lifelong British bike nut, he has also sailed a yacht around Australia and had a long and successful career in motor racing as a driver and constructor before he switched to motorcycle land speed…

“I WANTED TO EXPLORE DIFFERENT OPTIONS, EVEN IF I WASN’T SURE HOW THE PUBLIC WOULD TAKE IT” I WANTED to build something ‘unrealistic’, something that looked like it came out of a comic book,” Wenley Andrews says of the Honda Fireblade he calls Angry Bird. “Most of my builds up until then were cafe style and I wanted to explore different options, even if I wasn’t sure how the public would take it.” Wenley had already made a name for himself in Sydney custom circles as a builder of cafe racers based on modern Triumph twins when his mind turned to completing a streetfighter project that had never really gotten off the ground nearly a decade ago. “The build began in 2008,” he says. “I was really into streetfighters, so…

“200MPH IS NOT THAT FAR AWAY BUT THE MOUNTAIN IS GETTING VERY STEEP” ONE of the many great things about land speed racing is the sound. There are no decibel limits nor audio barriers as riders and drivers stay hard on the gas seemingly forever, then stay on it some more. Long after they’ve disappeared into the haze and just as the noise starts to fade, the exhaust echoes off the far mountain range and you get to hear it in stereo. And still they stay on it! Most of the cars run booming V8s but they’ve been outnumbered by bikes for a while now, a direct legacy of The World’s Fastest Indian. The quickest local riders go as fast as 230mph on late-model four-cylinder Jappas, but it’s the big…

“ROLAND IS CLOSE TO THREE-TIMES WORLD 500 GP CHAMP KENNY ROBERTS, WHO OFFERED HIM THE KEYS TO HIS RACE WORKSHOP” ONE thing we’ve noticed at runs and shows lately is the growing number of air-cooled two-stroke customs, albeit from a low base. And why not? Two-stroke motorcycles are as retro as you can get, simple technology once common but now long abandoned, mostly because they don’t run as clean as four-strokes. Political correctness be damned, it’s about time they made a comeback! Roland Sands agrees. He is especially fond of two-strokes after a long road-racing career that culminated in winning the AMA national title on a TZ250 Yamaha almost 20 years ago. These days more famous as a custom bike builder — we’ve featured a bunch of his bikes in…

“THEY STEPPED OUT OF THEIR COMFORT ZONES AND TOOK THEIR FUNDRAISING TO A WHOLE NEW PLACE, 18,380 FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL” REGULAR readers will know all about the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride (DGR), a worldwide phenomenon that has taken the world by storm. Beginning as a concept idea in Perth, it has been taken to its unpredictable scale by the founder of the Sydney Cafe Racers, Mark Hawwa. In only just a few short and very hardworking years, Mark and his team turned this concept into becoming the world’s largest fundraising motorcycle event. It is held annually on the last Sunday of September, with funds being raised over the course of the year. This international charity event is aimed at those who own and ride classic and vintage-styled motorcycles, groom their…

“MANY CUSTOMS LOOK THEY ROLLED OFF THE SAME CAFE RACER PRODUCTION LINE. THERE HAD TO BE MORE TO IT THAN THAT” TOM Konecny and Pablo Steigleder are a pair of 20-something university students who, while pursuing their studies, have turned a custom bike-building hobby into a flourishing business, Diamond Atelier, in just a few short years. As good German boys, their main focus is on Berlin-built BMWs, in particular airhead twins. No two are alike but none as aggressive as this, their fourth build and the first based on an eight-valve R nineT, which they call DA#4. The custom bike scene in Munich in 2013 was happening but the bikes had a sameness about them, Tom says. “With most custom parts being bought from catalogues and not hand-built, the majority…