100 YEARS AGO the Austin 7 was released, a car which went on to become the British Model T Ford — affordable to the middle class, copied around the world and produced in massive numbers.
It was powered by a 747cc four cylinder powerplant, one which Briton Bob Collier used to make a number of Bitza specials, including his final creation and the one restored by the Sammy Miller Museum I was allowed to ride.
This was his sixth Austin 7-powered bike. The first was sold incomplete, a buyer so keen to get his hands on it he wouldn’t wait for Collier to finish it. The funds from the sale let him build the second though, which was successful enough but he wasn’t happy with the unsprung chassis.
So the third used an HRD-Vincent V-twin frame, complete with the standard cantilever rear suspension.
Later on in the late 1940s, he built another RGC (his initials) Four road bike, this time with alternative front suspension in the form of the actual OEC duplex front end off Joe Wright’s purported Land Speed Record-breaker — but before that he’d previously built his fifth such Austinengined bike in 1946.
Unlike other builders of the time doing similar things, Collier mounted the engine transversely,
