Multi-Coloured CHOP SHOP!
The term ‘café racer’ has been with us since the 1950s, when the music of Eddie Cochran and Bo Diddley spun on jukeboxes in transport cafés, and ‘Ton-up Boys’ began making headlines with their leather-clad look, sat astride stripped-back bike customisations.
A new motorcycle culture had been born, as the bikes morphed into lean, mean machines with their single racer seats and low clip-on bars, racing petrol tanks, cone megaphone mufflers and swept-back exhaust pipes. Soon, specialist manufacturers jostled for space alongside those renowned manufacturers eager to grab a piece of the action, developing a new breed of café racer for the retro market.
Moving from Essex to the Isle of Wight aged five, Ian Saxcoburg grew up with bikes. Originally trained as a mechanical engineer, he admits to probably spending too many years on the drawing board and on 3D CAD systems, all the while thinking, tinkering or building bikes.
In 2011 he happened upon an American television programme called Café Racer, where a guy had customised a machine based on a Honda CX500. “I thought it was really good and told myself that I was going to make one similar,” he recalls. “As my principal idea behind customisations had been to use older, cheaper and readily available
