Bikes you couldn’t buy
Looking through the back issues of the motorcycle press of the Sixties, there are a number of machines which regularly featured in the sports reports of the time and were well known, but couldn't be bought. Why?
Because they were works specials, hand-built examples of sporting machines - and there was little intent from whatever factory's name was on the tank to build them as production machines.
Why go to the effort of doing all this? Well, in the Sixties, off-road sport was seen as a development tool-yes, a factory was interested in being seen as a winner, but this wasn't the primary object of the exercise.
You see, there are few test beds more challenging than the one where a motorcycle is plastered in mud and subjected to rapid acceleration from tickover to valve-bounce in all gears as its rider concentrates on winning. Any shortcomings in components will show up very quickly, often disastrously, under these circumstances. Things which road riders might take many thousands of miles to test out were done in 45 furious minutes, discussed in
