Retrobike

PUTTING the feature together on Bob Prior’s Suzuki GT750 on page 28 brought the memories flooding back. My first road bike was a GT750 that I bought secondhand in 1977. It was nothing like Bob’s in appearance or performance, far from it, but it was t

YAMAHA Viragos are almost made for customising, especially the first mono-shock models from the early 1980s. Plentiful and cheap, especially in Europe, they are nicely-proportioned bikes with simple, mostly hidden frames and soulful torquey engines t

YAMAHA’S XV750 Virago was only the second Japanese V-twin ever when it was released in 1981 (the first was the Honda CX500 in 1978) and the first Japanese bike designed from the ground up as a cruiser. Conceived as an affordable lightweight competito

EVER had that niggling feeling that you wish you hadn’t sold a favoured bike in the past, or at least had a strong yearn to do it all again with something similar? “I owned a McIntosh back in the mid to late 1980s,” Tony Bianco says. “It had been dam

BRITAIN’S annual Goodwood Revival, held each September since 1998 over the 3.8km Motor Circuit, first opened by the Duke of Richmond in 1948, is widely considered to be the world’s premier historic race meeting, attracting a sell-out crowd of 150,000

BOB Prior first drag-raced a Suzuki GT750L ‘water bottle’ at Castlereagh drag strip in western Sydney in 1974, sponsored by his employer, Northcott Motorcycles, in Blacktown, where Bob worked as a mechanic. “I did a 12.7 (seconds) on it,” he says of

PRETTY much every custom bike builder on the planet has a house style, from Japanese master craftsman Kengo Kimura to US metal wizard Max Hazan and German power duo Diamond Atelier. You could look at any of their bikes and know who built it, generall

WHAT started as an underground custom styling trend is now so mainstream that even major motorcycle manufacturers like Triumph, Ducati and BMW are in on the act. 1960s-style scramblers feature in all their new-model line-ups, and it won’t be long bef

RIDING bikes in the 1970s was pretty cool. Catch up with some mates a few days in advance (no mobile phones or internet), organise a meeting place (usually someone’s house) and head off on a ride on your favourite roads. There was less traffi c and t

1973. England. Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Led Zeppelin. Bowie. Queen. Hot pants, bell-bottom jeans and platform shoes. And Robert, the owner and builder of this Triumph Trident T150V, was 13 years old as it rolled off the line in England’s i

BRITISH 650cc vertical twins still ruled the roads when Triumph first started work on a three-cylinder 750 in 1962. Engineer Burt Hopwood and designer Doug Hele had a prototype up and running by 1965, but critically it would take another four years b

THE prototype V6 Laverda endurance racer made a single brief but memorable appearance just over 40 years ago in the 1978 Bol d’Or 24-hour race. Riders Nico Cereghini and Carlo Perugini retired after eight hours with a broken final drive coupling when

AFTER two years of the best blue-sky weather the mid-north coast of NSW can offer, the heavens opened for the third annual Rattletrap festival on the beach at Crowdy Head, north of Taree, in May. Heavy showers lashed the event all morning, then taper

NIGEL Irvine has been around motorcycles forever and remembers first hand the dramatic impact Japanese bikes had in the early 1970s. Gone were the old, oil-leaking English machines often bought cheaply secondhand and destined to break down at the mos

BY 1920, the basic format of the motorcycle as we know it today was well established, even if detail design of things like forks and brakes and rear suspension had yet to evolve. And then there was the Megola, with what looked like a mini radial airc

THE Broadford Bike Bonanza was first held 11 years ago over two days at Easter at the Broadford Motorcycle Complex in Victoria. The concept for the event was to get older bikes out of the shed and onto the track, be it dirt or bitumen, with trials, e

LINDSAY Urquhart is a legend of Australian motorcycling. A successful local sidecar racer and constructor from the late 1950s, who also enjoyed overseas success, Lindsay is an innovative engineer who, amongst other things, built the world’s first sma

IF YOU like to get out of town for a night or two and prefer to stay at pubs rather than motels, join the club. I love country pubs, or at least some of them. The friendly ones. I’m not knocking motels — my wife loves them and won’t go near a pub — b