The Classic MotorCycle

Started in 1903, The Classic MotorCycle has more to offer the true vintage motorcycle enthusiast than any other publication, backed by Europe's largest motorcycle image archive.

Welcome

GET YOUR FIX • Struggling to get to the shops?

The Classic MotorCycle

‘A wonderful display of endurance’ • So ran the headline in the September 30, 1920, edition of The Motor Cycle, celebrating Jack Holroyd’s record-breaking run.

News & Events

On top of Europe • The Motor Cycle’s correspondent Bernal Osborne documents a 2000-mile trip around Scandinavia on a 249cc Villiers-powered Excelsior.

Blackpool towers • The 1965 Northern Show was really being pushed in the ‘traditional’ motorcycle press, with exhaustive guides and previews aplenty.

Readers’ Letters • YOUR VOICE & YOUR OPINIONS

A weekend in paradise! • An event at the National Speedway Museum, within the Paradise Park in Hertfordshire, annually celebrates the first official dirt-track event in Britain.

Meteor MINOR MAYHEM • Royal Enfield’s half-litre twins were often underrated machines – but they were not without their flaws.

Two-stroke template • The best known purveyors of 250cc performance ‘strokers’ were Yamaha and Suzuki – but both firms owed plenty to the German Adler, which came before.

Full service history • Sold brand-new in Cambridgeshire in 1927, this amazing Sunbeam Model 90 has only had three owners in all its years, with its whole lifetime known and documented.

Retired officer • This unusual ex-Italian forestry police Moto Guzzi 160 Stornello has found itself in the environs of the west country, where it enjoys a sedate post-law enforcement life.

Landed parts • It would be easier if pistons were parallel-sided cylindrical bungs, but, mostly, they aren’t. True, many cast iron pistons were, but virtually all aluminium-silicon alloy pistons we’ve used for decades are mildly oval and tapered.

A Star is born • Remembering a lost love inspired this project, a true story of building a motorcycle from bits.

The forgotten makers • In the 1930s, the Stevens brothers, formerly makers of AJS, built something approaching 1000 machines bearing their own name, but survivors are rarely seen.

More on trends • A single development launched in 1895 made all earlier vehicles with slow-speed engines obsolete. For trikes and motorcycles, it was the closest thing to an overnight sensation and changed everything. Sprung forks and countershaft gearboxes were important adoptions, too.

Montesa Cota 247

Sketchbook Travels • MOTORCYCLES, SEEN THROUGH THE SKETCHBOOKS OF MARTIN SQUIRES

You were asking • Your queries resolved with Richard Rosenthal

Diary

The name’s (nearly) the same • As with many things in motorcycling, different makes and models are seemingly judged at different levels, even when it comes to their names.

Different times • The classic magazine world was a very different place in the late 1980s, with rather different attitudes to what constituted a ‘working day…’ But some things, such as the enthusiasm of those involved, never change.