VELOCETTE MAC
VELOCETTE SINGLES ARE KNOWN for their style, substance and prehaps unfairly for being challenging to own. If you don’t have the skills of an engineer so the myth goes, you’d better acquire them along with your MAC, Viper, MSS or Venom, or at least know someone who knows their way around these classy creations.
If you get one that’s been poorly put together then you should be prepared for months, if not years, of hard work and frustration in getting it to run properly. But if you manage to lay your hands on a good one, you’ll be lucky enough to own one of the very best British motorcycles ever built.
Of all the Velo pushrod singles the MAC 350 is the easiest to live with. Softly tuned and capable, the MAC was a contradiction; a sophisticated workhorse. The first MACs produced just 14bhp, and had a top speed of around 75mph, which hardly sounds like an earth-shattering performance, but it was faster than Velocette’s K series OHC 350. As a cooking model the MAC was rejected by those after speed and power, but you could ride one at close to full chat all day long without vibrating machine or rider to bits. Velocette sold nearly 25,000 MACs, despite the fact they were considerably more expensive than their AMC and BSA rivals. It was the bike that saved Velocette when the much admired LE, in which the company had so much faith, returned poor sales.
The MAC originally arrived long before the LE
