Features

Our Vase B team with, left to right: Dave Smith, Geoff Chandler, Mick Bowers, Geoff Monk and Dave Hobbs with team management of Chris Oliver and Ian Driver. It’s all well and good reading up on a subject and then producing a seven page feature about it, in fact the back issues of MotorCycle in…

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A bike built to go can be good enough to show. The 1970 250cc two-stroker has just recently been purchased by the Irish motocross racer who already has in his possession a superb collection of similar vintage iron at his Ballymena home in Northern Ireland. Now before we get down to the nitty gritty and…

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A typical riding day in the Mojave Desert… Everyone who has ever ridden a motorcycle for the sheer pleasure of it has recollections of their own golden days – periods and places where, in retrospect, it just couldn’t have got any better. For me, and literally thousands of other dirt riders, that time was in…

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There is a similar photograph to this, taken in the BSA comp shop, which features Graham Horne and his boss Brian Martin with this very machine. Vic wanted to recreate the shot. The life of a motocross GP motorcycle bears many similarities to that of a pop star, both have lots of attention lavished on…

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Erik Stenlund is a double champ. A fact that might puzzle many readers of CDB, at least the ones who feel they are reasonably familiar with classic MX heroes from Sweden. They know the likes of Sten Lundin and Hakan Carlqvist. But Erik Stenlund? Erik lives in Uppsala, a prominent town north of Stockholm in…

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All nice and neat, very little sticking out, just as a trials bike should be. The worst possible finish to a day’s riding is to be carted off to hospital with a broken leg, but that’s just what happened to Yorkshire electrician James Noble in the 2014 Pre-65 Scottish – a couple of sections from…

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Memories are jogged as to where the course went in the now picturesque woodland, where once the sound of MX monsters roared. For several years before the Autodromo’s construction began, Club Romagnolo (now known as Club Romagnolo Auto e Moto d’Epoca – CRAME for short) was running international MX on the heavily wooded hillside that…

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Mike Curtis: A happy man, or at least he was as soon as the pic was taken. Though BSA’s Gold Star had a brilliant reputation in scrambling, not everyone could get on with it, nor was it particularly easy to look after. If you don’t believe that check out our Iconic Engines series a couple…

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The world experimented with colour for Graham Wiggins’ Greeves era. Legendary journalist Ralph Venables, in his weekly column in the Green Un in 1958, sang the praises of five young West Country men who he predicted were stars of the future. One of these was Graham Wiggins; a then 18-year-old from West Wiltshire who, in…

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Tarmac, rain and off-road tyres is an interesting mix at the first bend. Given the size of the Isle of Man it seems incredible that an event noted for long distances could be held there once let alone three times and, conveniently for us it was nicely bracketed in one decade. Even better from our…

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