Tutorial For The 'car Guys': Why Bikes?

I had a conversation with Stephen Cox of Sopwith Motors a few days ago regarding the upcoming Las Vegas motorcycle auctions.  Stephen and I will be filmed by NBC TV during Saturday’s Mecum auction at the South Point Casino, where I’ll provide ‘color’ commentary on the machines coming across the podium, for the first time in 5 years…at Vegas, anyway – before joining Bonhams auctions in 2010, I provided ‘color’ for MidAmerica auctions at their Las Vegas, Monterey, and St Paul sales in 2008/9.

Stephen asked for a few reasons car collectors might be interested in motorcycles…a controversial subject among hard-core bike enthusiasts, who feel ‘car people’ will only raise prices, without returning energy into the motorcycle world by riding/restoring/participating in motorcycle events. That’s a respectable argument, but I have a different take; building bridges to the car collecting world just might keep vintage bikes legal to ride in the future.  Car collectors outnumber and outspend motorcyclists by a very large margin, and have robust organizations defending their rights to use old, polluting, and ‘unsafe’ cars on the road.  The more ‘car guys’ who think bikes are cool means more people who’ll get upset when repressive legislation is pending – and that seems to happen every year, somewhere. Yes, the car guys might make Brough Superiors and Vincent Lightnings into $Million motorcycles, but there are just too many old bikes out there for them all to become unaffordable.

Hankering for a Vincent Black Shadow over a Rapide, for example, is an emotional problem, not a rational one, a habit Karl Marx first described as ‘commodity fetishism’, in which our desires are projected onto objects.  The truth is, 60 years down the line, there is no real difference between a Rapide and a Shadow, barring a little black paint, a big speedo, a few stampings, and $100k.   Similarly, a 1936 H-D Knucklehead gives an identical ride to a ’47 model, even though the first-year bike costs $100k more.  I’m fine with giving over supposedly precious motorcycles to the hype-hounds and the connoisseurs, who’ll duke it out in price wars, as is their wont.  I’ve owned over 300 motorcycles since I was 15, from an original-paint 1925 supercharged Zenith-JAP, four Brough Superiors, a phalanx of pukka racing Velocettes, Nortons, Sunbeams, Rudges, etc, and a whole lot of really good bikes from Britain, Europe and Japan.

I figured out what I liked over time, and kept what works for me, which was always weighted towards the quality of the ride over ephemera like matching numbers or even provenance.  I found my mismatch Manx just as fun as the one Hailwood rode, and a cobbled-from-parts Velocette Clubman as invigorating as an original-paint, one-owner bike.  That might seem odd for a historian – to value the ride over the story – but for me the joy of motorcycling is in the riding, not the hoarding.

Here’s the text of my interview with Stephen Cox:

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