By: Dave Abrahams
Cape Town - Bikers, especially those of the burgeoning retro culture that focuses on the golden era of the late sixties, ‘70s and ‘80s, are always up for a party. Throw in live rock music, dancing girls and beer on tap and you have the ingredients for a memorable thrash.
And that’s exactly what happened at the second annual Retro Bike Day, hosted at the weekend by Retro Prestige Motorcycles in Paarden Eiland. By the advertised starting time of 11am the street outside the shop was wall to wall with close to 100 motorcycles, and more kept arriving until mid-afternoon.
They were an extraordinary mix of classics (including some painstakingly restored early Japanese fours), beautifully modified (or, in at least one case, totally hand-built) café racers and (nearly all egregiously hacked-about) bobbers.
The common factor, however, was that nearly all of them were impressively neat and tidy, a-glisten and a-gleam (to paraphrase a certain transsexual from Transylvania) in the summer sun, rolling proof of the care and attention lavished on them by their owners and specialised workshops such as RPM.
Few of the bikes were new, and fewer still were standard, but each expressed the character - and self-respect - of its rider in ways cheque-book engineers simply wouldn’t understand.
A case in point was Jens and Marcus Henkel’s prize-winning café racer, based on a 1996 BMW R1100R, finished in matt black with the BMW propeller emblem on the tank in high-gloss piano black. A casual eye wouldn’t even see it was there – especially in deep shade – but in the right light the effect was stunning.
The undoubted star of the day, however, was a magnificent café racer based on a Meriden-era Triumph Bonneville, complete with hand-beaten polished-alloy fuel tank and tail-piece, built by a professional restorer over a period of three years. Its owner sportingly didn’t enter it in the concours (he didn’t even take it off the trailer!) but it got more than its fair share of attention just standing there, as did a much more standard but very tidy late-1940s Vincent Series C Rapide, restored by the hosts, which was also not entered, presumably for ethical reasons.
MAKING SOME NOISE
One of the advantages of throwing a party in an industrial area that’s practically deserted at weekends is that you can make as much noise as you like.
“Let us know if we’re too loud,” quipped singer/guitarist Johnny Ray, but that never happened as he and his band - bassist Shelley Mackay-Davidson and drummer Steven Gordon - ripped into blues-rock and grunge numbers so perfectly suited to the occasion that the rumble of more motorcycles constantly arriving seemed like part of the music.
Meanwhile, the shop was organised mayhem as champion barista Chris and two helpers kept the espresso machine revving to the redline, the Italian Motorcycle Owners Club kept the boerewors rolls rolling, hard-working barpersons kept thirst at bay doling out draught in the workshop, and retro bikers paged through retro bike magazines (OK, old bike magazines!) and bike bits at the autojumble tables.
Most of which came to a sudden halt when the burlesque dancers took to the stage – first the remarkably flexible Sapphire Flex with a whimsical rendition of ‘At Last’, followed by Diva Disaster, whose old-school routine to the 1931 Cab Calloway classic ‘Minnie the Moocher’ was complete with satin bustier (for a while, anyway) and ostrich-feather fans, and earned her an enthusiastic response from the bikers.
Then it was time for Toy Run MC Mike ‘Mike’ Clark to present the trophies to the riders of the winning concours bikes, decided by popular vote. Bernard Geldenhuys won Best Bobber with his tracker-style BMW R65 ‘The Kraken’, the Henkels’ matt-black BMW was adjudged Best Café Racer and Emile Vivian Rocher took Best Classic with a near-immaculate 1973 Honda CB550 Four.
No biker party is complete without a little rubber smoke; Simon Portlock did the honours as he warmed up his Yamaha SR500 – a genuine café racer in that it used to be his race bike and he now uses it to go to the café on!