Rick Parkington, motorcycle restorer and writer for Classic Bike, has been my hero for years. He's an advocate for all I love about old cars and bikes. I'm not interested in some gleaming, over-restored, never-used piece of garage jewellery. I want to see old junk used daily, used hard and looking old. And so does Rick
His bike collection is epic - A 1919 Blackburne, a Rex-Acme, a legendary Norton-framed, Vincent engined hybrid cafe racer that he's trying to make look more like a standard bike, a built-from-bits 500cc Gold Star. Cool collection, but they don't just sit there - he takes the Rex to track days and dices with machines 50 years younger.
He can be relied on for an opinion on what's a reasonable amount of oil to leak in a cafe carpark or what metric thread bolt can best be mashed in to a Whitworth nut to get your Velocette KTT back on the grid. A handy man to know if you needed to grind in a new valve on the side of the road in the rain.
He says things like "My indicators are on the ends of my arms, so I wasn't concerned about the complex switch gear", when talking about a Japanese bike from before I was born.
I wonder, then, what he'd think of this:
Daniel and I saw one in the flesh for the first time a few weeks ago as it lane split past my truck and stopped at a set of lights. We just stared until the light went green and it disappeared in a moment. We were spellbound, but I wonder what someone who rides a hot-rod Vincent on the street and races a 6hp veteran would think of it.
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