Classic Bikes Meet Moderns At Motorcycle Live 2021

Motorcycle Live 2021 is what you might associate with new bikes, but there are plenty of classics on display too. Heritage is a big deal for manufacturers, and they’ll often wheel out their collections, whereas some manufacturers are doing very well producing what I like to think of as new old machines.

BSA Is Back With The Gold Star

BSA is a name that carries a great deal of weight in the classic bike world, being attached to one of the greatest British bike manufacturers ever. The original company was founded in 1861, making firearms, sporting equipment, power tools and metal processing.

Birmingham Small Arms even got involved with car and bus manufacture, but it was the move into bicycles and then motorcycles by 1910.

BSA went bankrupt years ago, but with the backing of Mahindra of India they’re back with a new take on the Gold Star. Complete with a new 650cc single great looks and impressive build quality from the pre-production examples on display. The new bike was attracting a lot of attention and if that is anything to go by it should sell well.

Being more of a traditional sort of machine, I mean classically styled and specced, it’s also likely to be reasonably priced. Rumour has it that it’s going to be around £6,000.

It’s got more than a passing resemblance to the original, the entire bike being a reincarnation of quite possibly one of the best British bikes of all time. It’s no longer air cooled, the large radiator giving a clue to the more modern nature of the engine. Based on an ‘Austrian’ unit the engine has been completely redesigned to now sit vertically in the frame, just like they used to.

1942 BSA M20 Weighty Warrior

I think the M20 is one of the best looking bikes BSA produced, the military versions especially. Being the backbone of the British army in the second World War being strong and easy to service. But they weren’t particularly fast and were a bit too low to tackle some of the poorer conditions. They were also quite heavy.

BSA made 126,334 motorcycles for the military, most of them were M20s and 250 cc C10s. The 500 cc engine made the M20 the road riding bike of choice, the 13 bhp enough to see it to 65 mph.

Royal Enfield

Royal Enfield are one of those manufacturers that I always thought of as manufacturing new old bikes. Things have changed a little bit in recent years with the launch of the Himalayan and the Interceptor, they’re traditional but not antiquated.

Even though they don’t need to dedicate half the stand to classics they did have a rather nice collection on display, each bike on loan by its owner.

1938 Royal Enfield KX 1140 cc

Royal Enfield didn’t just make those single cylinder bikes they have become synonymous with for years, they built some much bigger bikes years ago.

In 1936 the 1140 cc KX was one of those with the large side valve V twin. The 88.5 mm bore and 99.25 mm stroke engine had dry sump lubrication and separate conrods supported by their own pairs of roller bearings within the large aluminium crankcase which contained four oscillating plunger oil pumps.

The KX was capable of hitting 80 mph and cruising at 65 making it quite a useful tourer. 65 mpg and an 18 litre fuel tank gave it a decent range too. Remember, this was still the 1930s.

A couple of years ago the KX reappeared as a cruiser concept with a fairly large 838 cc V twin engine.

Royal Enfield Diesel

The Royal Enfield Diesel is one of those oddities that don’t quite fit. It’s hard to believe but this was the 1980s and continued into the 90s. Looking like a much older relic the Diesel was built to address ever climbing fuel prices in India.

Known as the Taurus in the home market it eventually succumbed to pollution laws in the year 2000, it didn’t get too much development but could be had with an electric start by 1993.

The 325 cc Diesel had no turbocharger so wasn’t particularly powerful with only 6.5 bhp and 11 lb-ft of torque, but it had fantastic economy. It was possible to get over 200 mpg though the top speed was only 40 mph.

Suzuki

This year Suzuki wheeled out a great collection of old race bikes and modern classics. The Grand Prix two strokes were excellent and not usually available to see like this. Old RG500s were always fascinating, and they were joined by a collection of other RGs and RGVs.

But the sight of the 2020 GSX-RR Grand Prix bike did distract me a little bit, this is on seriously expensive bit of kit and not something normally left lying around for people to get that close to.

Kevin Schwantz 1993 RGV500

Kevin Schwantz’s 1993 RGV500 is a really good looking bike, small and almost delicate. 130kg is pretty light for and decent sized motorcycle. 165 bhp is quite a lot when you put it in something this compact and light, a world away from the modern Grand Prix machines with their four stroke engines and electronics to keep them in check.

1993 was the year that Schwantz won the title, and it was also the year that Wayne Rainey ended his career. The crash effectively handed the championship win to Schwantz.

1990 Suzuki GSX1100 SL Katana

Road going classics contained a favourite of mine, the GSX 1100 Katana. I always wanted one of these but couldn’t afford even a sheddy one. The 1000 is really rare and the 1100 was always produced in much larger numbers. They did a 750 too, complete with pop up headlight.

The GSX 550 and 650 Katanas were really just a badging exercise and didn’t have anything special about them and in North America pretty much everything had a Katana sticker.

But for a while Suzuki made some smaller versions, the 250 and 400. The 400 really did look like a 5/8th scale version of the real thing and I dreamed of having one of them. Part of the 1990s craze for grey imports that didn’t last. Which is a shame as there are some really interesting machines out there.

The original Katana has to be the best. It’s big, heavy and long as all good old Japanese big bikes were. This stopped them wobbling too much and made the steering a lot slower than a modern bike, but they’re not too bad. Stable, solid and relatively comfortable and stunning to look at.

This one was bought new by the owner of A&D Suzuki Motorcycles, Alan Shepherd. 1990 was the year the Suzuki were celebrating 70 years and decided to build 200 Katanas just as they were in 1982. Alan bought one and kept it on display in the showroom, it’s never been registered or even ridden.

1985 Suzuki GSX-R 750

Another one I thought might make a sensible purchase, several years ago. Of course a cheap one for general motorcycling duties. It would have probably worked fine, but probably not the best thing to have run on a shoestring.

Thankfully someone has spent time and money on this example and its was superb, it should be as it was the bike that was restored on the stand back in 2015. The blue and white colour scheme looks so good on these early GSX-Rs. The 750 being the race replica with decent performance although 100 hp might not seem like too much today, but back in 1985 it made this thing pretty rapid. No electronics here and all the better for it.

Honda

The Honda stand was busy, as usual, with people trying all manner of new bikes for size and there were some good ones too. There were plenty of new models to make some noise about, the new Fireblade is one of them. At the back of the stand there was a collection of lots of them from the earlier ones to the latest.

1992 Honda CBR900RR Fireblade

The first Fireblade was ground-breaking. Effectively a 600 cc sports bike with a 900 cc engine stuffed in it. Smaller, lighter, faster steering that what came before, the new bike set the direction for all other sports bikes to follow.

It was all the fault of Tadao Baba who asked the question,

‘Why do powerful bikes have to be so heavy?’

then promptly went out and built a lighter one.

1996 Honda CBR900RR Fireblade

The 1994 Foxeye has its own cult following, it did look stunning, but it was in 1996 that Honda too the Fireblade engine up to 918.5 cc from 893 cc, still not a big engine for the time, but the additional power was noticed.

The Blade was always that bit lighter than the competition, coming in at around 185kg, 183 kg in 1996 and with 126 bhp it went well. But it’s not just the performance, Honda made them really well and they actually make a half decent tourer.

A classic already for sure, and remarkably good value still. For now.

Harley Davidson

Harley Davidson had a great collection of bikes on display, seemingly populated from the collection of great bikes at the oldest dealers in the UK, Warr’s. They’ve been at it since 1924, so have had plenty of time to amass a decent collection of bikes.

From the 1957 XL to the XR750 Flat Tracker, they were superbly presented, and I couldn’t help wanting something like, all of them. There were a couple of really unusual bikes there One of them makes no sense and yet looks like it would work.

Harley Davidson 883 Sportster Rally Duck

The 1992 883 Sportster Rally dusk is one of those bikes that shouldn’t work, but strangely does.

Built to compete in rally and Baja events the Rally duck now makes 125 hp at the rear wheel, which is pretty impressive for any Harley. But this one looks great and that translates into something useful. What I’m not sure about is how much it might weigh, as a standard Sportster is no lightweight.

1972 Harley Davidson XR 750 TT

The success in flat track racing saw Harley take to road racing and develop the XR750 into the fully faired machine you see here.

Starting out with 80 hp, this grew to 100 or so by the time the XR series was retired in 2008. What caught my attention was the size of the front drum, yes, no disc brakes here, until you look at the back wheel and see one. You’d often find Japanese bikes with a disc at the front and drum at the rear, but Harley did things their own way. Eventually the bike was to gain hydraulic discs, but it took a while.

It might appear a little old fashioned, but it looks great.

Norton Rotary RCW 588

You wait ages to see a rotary Norton and there are six of them not too far apart. The Crichton stand, with their latest rotary monster, had four of the fantastic bikes, two with JPS liveries.

This represented one of the greatest eras in motorcycle racing, from 1988 to 1991. Come to think of it, it was a good era all roaund, Le Mans WEC, rallycross and rallying. We never had it so good.

But watching these on the TV when younger left quite the impression. Hopefully the new Chrichton will stick around, it certainly looked impressive. But those original Nortons were stunning.

They may have only made 139 hp but these things were fast. Lightweight at 145 kg and fast revving they really seemed to fly, often passing things easily from what I recall. This bike put Norton back in the frame as a top racing manufacturer again.

The National motorcycle Museum even brought Robert Dunlop’s old race bike out and had it next to the 1992 Abus Norton Rotary.

Even though the show was a little bit smaller, there were so many really good bikes to see, plenty of classics around the show with the newly reborn Norton wheeling out a couple more of them.

1949 Norton Model 30 International - Geoff Duke TT

This 1949 Model 30 international was the TT winner ridden by legend Geoff Duke. The six times world champion won his first of seven Isle of Man TT’s on this bike. Duke started out as a Norton employee, with some rather obvious extra talent.

The Model 30 is small, low and quite compact. Whilst motorcycles may not look to have evolved too much, being a wheel at each end and an engine in the middle, the geometry is noticeably different when you compare something of this vintage to something much more modern.

It’s amazing to think that the TT was just ass dangerous, if not more so, back when a bike like this would only hit 98 mph top speed. An 83.71 mph average speed lap seems all the more impressive, especially when it had just 29 bhp.

Simon

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