Grand sports!
This was a complete surprise. We’d rolled up to North Cornwall Motorcycles (you can guess where they are and what they do, I bet) to borrow a Kawasaki from Mike who does something important there. I’m not sure what it is that he does, but he’s very good at it and it involves drinking a lot of coffee. This is a pair of good things. Mike rides a W650, and we’d asked to borrow it. He’d agreed. We set a date, an approximate time, rocked up and discovered two things. First: both of the posh magazine-quality cameras we’d brought (you can never be too careful) had flat batteries (maybe you can), and NCMC had a Panther in their showroom. A 2-stroke Panther.
So. Two flat batteries and a Panther. What to do? Easy. Reveal with shamed embarrassment that flat battery situation (much shrugging and sly smiles) and enquire innocently whether the Panther was a runner? Of course it was. The bike’s battery was flatter than either of those in the cameras, but it still started … just like that, as a magic man used to say. And my cell phone takes pictures…
Right, that’s the excuses out of the way. Why the Panther, and what is it? The what it is bit is easy: it’s a Panther Model 50, notionally a 350 but in fact just 324cc. A twin, which is unusual in the annals of Panther lore. A 2-stroke twin. The
