Fantic Motor has just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a lavish presentation dinner in its present hometown of Treviso. Not a bad achievement for a company that still produces hand-built motorcycles in Italy. It can’t claim to be under the…
The ‘Buy it Now’ button loomed large, but the sale price was a little too fat for my liking, sure I wanted this Honda Novio even though I faced a long trip to Somerset to collect. The seconds ticked down,…
In the words of Jasper Carrott in 1975 ‘When I get me moped out on the road …. I’m gonna ride ride ride’. It reached the top five in the charts, and yes those awaiting their 16th birthday could only…
Fancy a ‘P’? – Peculiar Preservation Whilst we don’t expect everyone to feel ‘inspired’ by our latest creation, give it a few lines and I will try to explain why this strange motorized cycle has consumed the last few months…
As a classic car reporter I rarely get the chance to wax lyrical about the joys of the motorcycle world.
A gathering of over 110 sports mopeds from the 70’s and 80’s descended upon the Billing Aquadome, Northants, for a meeting of the species.
The moped culture of the early 70’s left the biking world with a host of great memories. The greatest tales of all have to be those concerning exactly which was the fastest machine out there. Stories of 50cc bikes achieving 70 mph were commonplace and yet, not once, to our knowledge, has any such event ever been witnessed by a third party, let alone officially recorded.
It wasn’t all fizzers in the 70’s, the Italians had a fair bit to say on the subject too. CP catches up with a cracking Garelli to see what all of the fuss is about.
The KL50 had been around for some time on the continent but hadn’t made an appearance in the UK due to the legal requirement for all learner legal sixteener specials to have pedal power.
Introduced in 1968, the Yamaha YAS1 defies all motorcycle logic, even by today’s standards of miniaturisation. As a development of the previous Yamaha roadster twin designs, the vertically split, twin-cylinder engine is compact and powerful, this in turn is wrapped in an equally diminutive frame that does its best to hold the wheels inline and weighs next to nothing in the bargain. Looking around the AS1 chassis you cannot help but notice the amount of parts that wouldn’t look out of place on a moped.
37 year old Neil Pullen’s affair with this RD50 began two years ago when he bought a Yamaha DT50M as a little bit of fun and also as a practical machine for his wife Sarah. Being a bit short in the leg department the DT seemed the perfect choice for her to get her biking experience upon. Having lavished the DT in new parts costing many hundreds of pounds the novelty of the 45 mph machine soon wore off for Sarah who then graduated on to a Yamaha TW125 leaving the by now immaculate DT50 to sit in the garage and later to be sold.
