Black Bultaco meets black cat

I did, because even a four-stroke 500 single ‘Velocette Tragic’ like me found the diminutive Spanish 250 cc two-stroke Metralla road bike strangely alluring. It was something to do with the grace and simplicity of that heavily finned motor with its rounded crankcases and the curved symmetry of the fuel tank and the exhaust system (even if for the Australian model you still had to carry around little cans of 2 stroke oil).

ran a feature on the Metralla back in Issue #25 in which Bultaco aficionado John Somerville wrote: “The type of person who bought these bikes fell into two categories. (1) Those who knew just how well these bikes went and were not blinded by all the chrome and lights of the Japanese bikes at the time, and (2) Those who bought