CW Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer and I recently did a podcast on bikes we selected from the roughly 2,000 listed for the Mecum Las Vegas Auction January 29–February 1, and I’ve continued to think about this. I feel on common ground with people who couldn’t afford a certain bike when it was in showrooms, but it has dwelt in their imaginations ever since.
There are the brand collectors, obsessed with a certain marque. There are “type/era” collectors who target something like 1970s sportbikes. There are those who’ve been advised by their wealth managers, “Collect something. Collectibles are a hedge against inflation.” I don’t mind that—such people may get the bug—even become motorcyclists! That first-year Kawasaki 750 H2, the legendary “biggest bang for the buck,” is pocket change compared with collector autos. Even Brough Superiors and Vincents are great values in the context of car collecting.
Aside from the Barber Museum in Birmingham, where else can you walk among a few thousand historic motorcycles in one place? And unlike in a museum, any one of these bikes might be yours, given desire and means.
My particular interest is in where a given old bike stands in the history of motoring simplicity: two wheels, an engine, and a place to sit. What follows are my 18 picks from the overwhelming array of machines in Las Vegas.
In Germany after World War I coal was scarce, forcing city dwellers to live in their kitchens as farmers did in winter. BMW, forbidden its former role as aircraft engine producers, accepted any work. This included building job lots of inferior motorcycle engines designed by outsiders. Irked by this, the company asked aircraft designer Max Friz (1883-1966) to run up something better. Friz disliked surface vehicles, but changed his mind when offered coal to heat a bedroom which he could use as a drawing office. He applied rational aviation design, canceling vibration by choosing the self-balancing flat-twin as his engine architecture. He oriented it with its finned cylinders projecting right and left into undisturbed cooling air—not in the “wind shadow” of the front wheel. This orientation made shaft drive a natural. His basic design has now endured for over a century.
World War I aviation showed the way forward for piston engines—overhead valves (OHV) with their more efficient flow path. Harley-Davidson in 1937 produced the EL with OHV, first of its long line of Big Twins continuing to this day. Improved flow basically doubled horsepower and allowed Harley-Davidson’s to keep pace with America’s ever-improving road system.
I have always loved England’s great sporting singles, but 1962 was the last year of their production: Norton Manx, Matchless G-50, and BSA’s versatile and accomplished Gold Star. Cutting Gold Star was company official policy—that twins were the future—especially for export. They were smoother, had the modern sound, and earned American dollars. BSA’s 1954 Big Push at Daytona did include Gold Stars among the new racing twins (five BSAs out of the top six), but their days were numbered despite its having long been a force in all competitive disciplines. The name—Gold Star—refers to the gold star awarded in the prewar era for a 100 mph lap at Britain’s great Brooklands Speedway.
In faraway and war-ravaged Japan of the early 1950s two hundred start-up motorbike producers competed. Honda made a leap with its step-through 50, the C100, first sold in 1958. Bicycle-sized wheels dealt safely with damaged streets, while a centrifugal clutch and three speeds made it easy for anyone to ride. With 100 million made, it is claimed to be the most-produced motor vehicle of all time. Its revenue funded Honda investment in the latest automated production systems and R&D equipment. On risky borrowed money, this bold push cut costs so that advanced features could be affordably offered “at kick-start prices.”
In the US of 1962, the dominant motorcycles were Harley-Davidsons and British parallel twins. When World War II ended in 1945, Americans were cash-rich from four years of scarce and rationed goods: They wanted to have fun. In the 1950s and ‘60s, US motorcycling was opposing camps: “Limey guys” and “Harley guys.” The Bonneville was designed to slake American “power thirst” and so was given twin carburetors, higher compression, and “bigger” cams in 1959. The name was chosen to leverage Johnny Allen’s 1956 Bonneville streamliner record (Triumph-powered!) of 214 mph. Sadly, the Bonnie’s cylinder head was outdated—a deep hemi with two widely splayed valves (included angle 90 degrees)—especially when compared to Bert Hopwood’s 1947 design for Norton’s export twin—with a very progressive 58-degree valve angle.
Phil Vincent had yearned to build something to outperform the Brough Superior SS100, which had ruled unchallenged since the 1920s. Britain’s postwar steel shortage made Vincent’s now much-copied frameless construction their choice—the steering head attached to the cylinder heads via a welded sheet metal box—that was “the frame.” The result was an extremely compact 1,000cc V-twin of unmatched acceleration and speed. Nothing else came close, but production was limited by high price. Think of this bike and the photo of Rollie Free, horizontal in bathing shorts, setting a 150-mph record at Bonneville, pops into the minds of all of us.
Harley’s reply to the British invasion was a curious combination of old and new. The K-model of 1953 was a side-valve, but in unit-construction form. When 750cc weren’t enough, it was enlarged to nearly 900.
While the market decided, Harley went racing with the KR, which brings to mind men with flat-top haircuts, wearing engineer boots and two-piece leathers throwing earthy plumes on dirt tracks across the nation. Its final moments—1968 and ‘69—were its greatest, as Calvin Rayborn made the Triumphs obsolete in the Daytona 200.
When side-valves failed to win the day against Britain’s OHVs, Harley muscled up the K-model with OHV as the now-mythic Sportster. Yes, it vibrated and you couldn’t ride it far. But it had attitude.
A new reality was coming—from Japan. Once their domestic market was saturated, further growth required export. Honda’s 1959 twin CB92 Benly introduced electric start, and by 1965 Harley-Davidson would find it necessary to adopt it as well. Benly made electric start and overhead cam routine in a world that was still dismissing those features as impossibly complex and expensive. The power of Benly and sister models greatly expanded the motorcycle market in America. As I was told at Harley-Davidson in spring, 1966, “Everything Honda has done here has increased our business.” Lightweight motorcycles were overcoming Americans’ fear that motorcycles give you tattoos.
Alfred P. Sloan showed at GM that vehicle ownership was proof of status. Begin with Chevrolet, move up to Olds. Who knows? Some day soon—Cadillac! So it proved with Japanese motorcycles. For a while, big-bike riders scorned Japanese imports as “playbikes.” Then bang, direct competition for Milwaukee and Britain hit: Honda’s four-cylinder CB750, outselling the slow-in-coming British triples 10-to-one. Modern production systems and adoption of automotive concepts brought features only dreamed of previously. Especially treasured are early-production CB750s with sand-cast cases. A 1970 CB750 K0 is pictured.
Kawasaki took this challenge as well. After the “beige performance” of its disc-valve two-stroke A1/A7 twins, the Green Men launched their 1969 three-cylinder 500cc H1 two-stroke, the bike that put Harley’s Sportster on the trailer. For 1972 it swelled into the 750 H2, “the thousand-dollar rocket ship” that put unbeatable acceleration into the hands of a multitude for whom too much was just enough. This forced Harley’s night-warrior street racers to change their tune. From 1972 onward, the official line became “Yeah, those ring-ding crotch rockets may be fast, but we know who’s cool.”
To replace its KR, no longer competitive under new AMA rules for 1970, Harley built 200 “iron XRs,” based on the Sportster. Iron conducts heat poorly, so for 1972 race team manager Dick O’Brien and design draftsman Piet Zylstra designed the bike that would dominate US dirt track for decades: the aluminum XR. Year by year, this bike and its torque curve were intimately fitted to dirt traction. It worked.
Saving riders from numb extremities with its Isolastic engine mounting, Commando was a final salvo from England. It is revered for good handling, modern power delivery, and smoothness, keeping all that parallel-twin engine vibration largely separate from the rider. For years, the Norton twin’s head, designed in 1947 by Bert Hopwood, was cited in the Superflow flow-bench manual as having the highest specific intake airflow (in cubic feet per square inch of valve head) known to them. How did Bert Hopwood decide to go against long-established practice in giving his twin a shallow, fast-burning combustion chamber rather than the deep hemi chambers (valve angle 78–90 degrees) favored by competitors? Hindsight: He was right, they were wrong.
The 1970 US Clean Air Act called an eventual halt to two-stroke road bikes, so Kawasaki switched. It had planned a four-stroke 750, but when persistent whispering revealed Honda was coming with a 750 it took a bigger leap—to 903cc. It was both the test and the proof of the liter-bike concept—something entirely new in mass-market motorcycling. The bike had its problems: 1960s chassis, suspension, and tires, pushed by an engine with double the power of British twins, but it defined a new future. Riders still speak with reverence of 1970s Superbike racers, wallowing and wobbling as their upright hero riders did the impossible. This forced Japan to quickly apply what they were learning in two-stroke GP racing to their second generation of big, capable four-stroke streetbikes.
In mountainous northern Spain new ideas and capabilities were afoot. To get anywhere in that terrain required agility, simplicity, and lightness. The name of that combo was Bultaco. Europe is where such new, light two-strokes took motocross from traditional four-strokes. This Bultaco TSS production roadracer had the same virtues. On the twisty Montjuic Park circuit, Señor Bulto’s singles made Honda’s factory 250 fours of the 1960s look elephantine.
Would American riders like to try those virtues in a new-look street-trail kind of motorcycle? Or was off-road riding only a figment of Edison Dye’s imagination? Just a fad of desert riding and steamy New England? DT-1 was Yamaha’s first try in that direction, and the others had to follow.
Off-road became huge and so did the DT-1.
Influential US Air Force pilot the late John Boyd years ago noted the loss in fighter performance caused by chronic weight growth. In 1920, Charles P. Franklin’s Indian Scout freed motorcycle performance from much functionless weight. In 1985 the periodic need for such dieting drove Suzuki to build a sportbike 100 pounds lighter than the competition—its first-gen GSX-R750. In 1998, Yamaha’s 1,000cc YZF-R1 delighted riders by “feeling as small and light as a 250,” dramatically refreshing the sportbike concept. R1 has risen in sophistication and capability ever since.
The motorcycle was born from the safety bicycle (both wheels the same size, chain drive), which was built in great numbers by the exploding manufacturing revolution. Here came new technologies: John Dunlop’s pneumatic tire, Germany’s seamless drawn steel tubing, Hans Renold’s power-efficient roller chain and sprockets, and the mass-produced ball bearing. Together they made the bicycle wildly popular from about 1895. This motorcycle and the next show the leap to engine power.
French Count de Dion and partner Georges Bouton, after trying steam power, took a license to produce the new internal combustion piston engines of Nikolaus Otto. By 1900 they had made more than 20,000 and they went to all parts of the world. In those days communication was a lot faster than moderns imagine—by magazine, by the great expositions, and person-to-person by letter. Combine the de Dion engine (or a local copy) with the bicycle and you’ve created a motorcycle. De Dion engines had automatic intake valves—suction-operated—making strange noises. Later, these engines evolved into intake-over-exhaust (IOE) form in which the intake was operated by a cute little rocker and a slender pushrod driven from a cam in the timing case. Many, many IOE bikes were built.
Early motorcycling in the US looked headed for great things, but Ford’s Model T put a stop to that. After 1913, US motorcycles lost their function as cheap transportation, remaining attractive mainly to police and athletic younger people. The Great Depression of 1929 culled the weak manufacturers, leaving only Harley and Indian.