Indice dei contenuti per #29 AUTUMN 2017/18 in Retrobike

“VISUAL IMPACT AND CREATIVITY COUNT AS MUCH AS PERFORMANCE, IRRESPECTIVE OF THE CLASS” THE Glemseck 101 is Europe’s biggest custom bike festival. Held over three days each September on a small section of what used to be the Solitude racetrack — home to the German 500 GP until 1964 — near Leonberg in southern Germany, Glemseck attracts tens of thousands of visitors to a long weekend of bikes, live music and heads-up 1/8th-mile drag racing. The mile-long pit paddock hosts the International Village of custom bike shops and clubs from all over Europe. The range of customs on show is staggering, covering all genres. It’s also the place to get watered and fed, and maybe take in one of the high-energy rockabilly, punk or rock’n’roll bands on stage. There is…

“NEW YORKERS MIGHT SCOFF, BUT MELBOURNE IS THE CLOSEST CITY WE HAVE TO DON DRAPER’S BIG APPLE” BY NOW many readers will have heard of the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride (DGR) and, in all likelihood, participated in one. Those who have will be aware that it was started in 2012 in Sydney by Mark Hawwa, who was inspired by a photo of Mad Men’s impeccably dressed Don Draper astride a classic motorbike. The 2012 DGR saw 2500 participants in 64 cities. Since then it has grown exponentially and in 2017 over 94,000 riders in 581 cities across 92 countries raised almost $5 million for prostrate cancer awareness and men’s suicide prevention on behalf of The Movember Foundation. It is a genuine modern-day phenomenon — there’s nothing else like it on the…

IN 1988, Ducati revived the famous Super Sport model name with an altogether easier-to-live-with belt-drive V-twin in place of the revered but high-maintenance bevel-drive engine. Basically a Pantah top end on a set of beefy 851 crankcases (also scoring the eight-valve’s six-speed gearbox), the new 900SS was faithful to the original model’s DNA of elegant simplicity, light weight, good brakes, sharp handling and deceptively quick on-road performance. The first model was a little underdone, but better carburation and new styling soon had it a big hit with critics and the public, despite steep prices. Some commentators described it as the ultimate real-world sports bike, inevitably spawning Japanese copies in the form of the Honda VTR1000, Suzuki TL1000S and Yamaha TRX850. I test-rode the redesigned 900SS for Streetbike in 1991 and…

YAMAHA was already a well-respected musical instrument brand (hence the tuning fork logo) when it produced its first motorbike, the 125cc YA-1 two-stroke single, in 1955. It stuck with two-strokes exclusively until the end of the following decade, refining their road-bike range with oil injection (in place of pre-mix) in 1964 and developing the 250cc TD-1 into an unbeatable production racer. The factory’s first four-stroke was the XS-1 vertical twin released at the end of 1969, styled after the once-dominant British twins but updated with a chain-driven overhead cam and horizontally split crankcases to keep the oil inside for a change. Offering similar performance to the Brits, mechanically it was a pearler, although the chassis was initially underdone and it earned an early reputation for poor handling. Front disc brakes…

“My Suzuki decided this was a great spot to drop its sump plug” MOST blokes don’t like to admit this fact — male pride and all that — but I know that I am not a good mechanic. I wish I was. I’m not hopeless, I know the theory better than I can do the practice, but if I’m with someone I know is a competent mechanic, I’m happy to let them take over. I’ll make the coffee or fetch the beer and keep the helpful suggestions down to a bare minimum. All that is good and fine during peacetime at home, but what happens when you break down on the open road? That’s where you need to have learnt at least a few mechanical basics, or be riding with…

EARLY Harley-Davidson Sportsters are thin on the ground, even in the US. Made in their tens of thousands today, total production run for the first model year in 1957 was just 1983 bikes, plus a small batch of XLAs for the military. Police forces and other government agencies purchased a significant number of the remainder, with relatively few making their way into private hands. Tony Bianco has been a Sportster fan since leaving school in Sydney in the late 1960s. “The Honda Four had just come out and it was a 750,” he says. “The (new) Triumph Trident was a 750. The Harley Sportster was a 900. Bigger is always better and the Sportster was the biggest bike you could get. I used to read everything I could on them.”…

A SELF-EMPLOYED carpenter from the Yarra Valley east of Melbourne, Roland Skate has been stuck on sixes since 1982 when he bought his first Honda CBX, a well-used ex-drag racer. “I fell in love with it because it gave so much performance, and especially so much fun, in return for so little attention,” Roland says. “I began doing track days and eventually plucked up the courage to go racing in 1994. I gave it a bit of TLC and have been progressively modifying it ever since. People used to rubbish the CBX, saying it’d never be able to make a race bike. But I knew the bike could be successful if I got a good rider aboard it.” Enter fellow Hartwell Motor Cycle Club member Michael Gibb in 2007, a…

THERE is little doubt that Burt Munro has sold more than a few Indians since the famous marque was relaunched by Polaris Industries in 2013, so good on the factory for returning the shout. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Burt’s world record on his highly-modified 1000cc 1920 Indian Scout — as immortalised in that movie — Indian Motorcycle set out to build their own record-setting salt racer from a brand-new 2017 Scout, then hired Burt’s grandnephew Lee Munro to ride it. From the outset, it was always intended that the new bike, the Spirit of Munro, would race in a different class — MPS-G1350 — so as not to surpass Burt’s record of 184mph set in 1967, which still stands. (Burt also reportedly ran 205mph the same year on…

WAYNE Fazzalari is a life-long petrolhead from Adelaide with an enviable collection of automobiles, including a couple of Porsches and a serious Ferrari. “My father was into speedway so I was always around cars and speedboats and engines,” he says, “just not so much motorbikes.” That all changed when he visited a friend in France some years ago. “He had an original Triton, first registered in 1959,” Wayne says. “I’d never had a bike before but said to my friend, if I was ever going to have a bike, that’s what I would get.” Wayne was true to his word when his mate later emailed to say he was moving the Triton on; a deal was struck and the bike was duly shipped down under. “I’d had it for a…

BY THEIR nature, racing motorcycles have a short shelf life, especially at the sharp end of competition. It’s hard enough being thrashed to within an inch of self-destruction every time you go out, even worse to then suffer the ignobility of being abandoned at the first sign on the scene of a newer faster model. And so classic racing kicked off to give bikes no longer competitive a second chance at life. Initially restricted to classic and earlier bikes built before 1963, the advent of post-classic racing in the mid-1980s for bikes built between then and 1973 set the precedent for an ever-growing list of classes which now cover bikes as late as 1997. I remember well the birth of the Post Classic Racing Association (PCRA) of NSW in 1986…

JUST over 60 years ago in 1957, Mondial capped its mercurial rise to road-racing supremacy by winning both the 125cc and 250cc World Championships. The Italian factory then withdrew from racing at the height of its success, although two of the 250 GP bikes went on to have a second life in the hands of one of England’s most revered road racers. Mondial was the creation of the Boselli family, wealthy land-owning nobility from the Piacenza area in the valley of the River Po, Italy’s breadbasket. Count Giuseppe Boselli treated his motorcycle business as a sideline to his agricultural interests, but as a former ISDT Gold Medal winner, he understood the value of competition success in promoting Mondial’s road bikes in sport-mad Italy. He therefore recruited designer Alfonso Drusiani in…

THE new Triumph Bobber was another of those bikes that I was hanging to try since spying the first photos a year ago. My tastes in the modern British stuff naturally lean towards the Thruxton, but I’ve also been a fan of rigid Triumph customs since I was a teenager. Yes, I know it only looks like a hardtail, but could the Bobber do for Triumph what the Softail did for Harley-Davidson? First impression in the metal is how low it is, especially when you see it parked next to a Bonneville or any other normal bike. Second impression is much the same when I ease myself into the saddle; if anything, it feels even lower, like stepping out of a 4WD Hilux into a 1964 Chevy Impala. I feel…

ULFERT Janssen lives the life. Formerly an automotive designer for Renault, he now pens mostly two-wheeled customs for well-healed clients through his business, Garnet Design, in Switzerland. Not all get built and those that do he doesn’t build himself. Instead, he and his clients commission third-party workshops to bring his drawings to life, while Ulfert dreams up the next one. His designs cover all the usual suspects — BMW R nineT, Triumph Bonneville/Thruxton, Ducati Scrambler, Yamaha Bolt — as well as less obvious choices like MV Agusta, the modern H2 Kawasaki and GSX-S1000 Suzuki. But he is best known, at least in these pages, for his Moto Guzzi creations for Dutch clothing brand Vanguard. The first, styled after the legendary Moto Guzzi V8 GP bike of 1955 and featured one…

“FABIO TAGLIONI ACCEPTED THE COMMISSION AS A TECHNICAL CHALLENGE” FEW motorcycles ever built have enjoyed as mythical a reputation as Ducati’s legendary but abortive V4 Apollo, the Italian marque’s failed attempt to produce a Harley-style cruiser aimed at the American market. Just two bikes were built and only this one survived. Back in 1960, Ducati was one of dozens of relatively small Italian manufacturers struggling to overcome the savage attack on its crucial home market levelled after 1957 by the cheap and cheerful Fiat 500, which, in its hundreds of thousands, brought an end to the post-war boom in Italian biking. Ducati’s annual production plunged to 6000 bikes and the factory went broke, kept afloat only by subsidies from the Italian government. Of those 6000 bikes, around 5000 were sold…

DEEP Creek Cycleworks is a motorcycle speed shop located in Diepenbeek, Belgium. They build customs from all manner of bikes, including early and late-model BMW twins, SOHC and twin-cam Hondas, Moto Guzzis and Ducatis. The only common denominator is that Deep Creek likes to start from as close to scratch as they can. “We are all about second chances,” proprietor Kris Renier says. “Everyone and everything deserves a second chance in life. We build or rebuild old and recent motorbikes into cafe racers, bobbers, trackers, custom motorcycles, you name it. We make them cool, built for a smooth ride and to turn heads. All of our bikes are made to ride.” Most often Deep Creek starts with a complete if down-at-hill donor bike, but that wasn’t the case here. “I…

JAY Donovan is a 24-year-old Canadian panel-beater who quickly tired of straightening busted Jeeps to pursue his passion for automotive design and traditional coach building. He set up his own workshop, BareSteel Design, two years ago on the south-west coast of British Columbia, just over the border from the US. “Starting off more automotive-based, I quickly realised that as well as improving my craft in metal shaping, I needed to incorporate my desire for creativity and invention,” Jay says. “Though I really enjoy automotive design, and the history of coach building, to design and build one-of-a-kind cars requires a lot of resources, time, space and money, and it’s a very small client base. The reality of my situation and only having a small 400sq/ ft workshop brought me back to…

WE’VE made it our rule here at Retrobike not to run stories on new bikes we haven’t ridden, but rules are there to be broken when a bike like the MV Agusta RVS#1 comes along. There’s nothing retro about it either, but when it comes to factory ‘neo racers’, this one is as custom as they come. Having said that, we have ridden a few modern-day MV Agustas over the past 20 years and we are familiar with the MV DNA; none is for the faint-hearted. They are hard-edged street bikes, always ready to go, skittish thoroughbreds that can mock ordinary riders but are revered by the fast guys. MV Agusta has impeccable history. The company started building small-capacity motorcycles in Verghera, Italy, not long after WWII, mostly to fund…