How Does it Feel to Drive?
Ferrari x Katarina Kyvalova, Queen B, Mouton and more –
It’s a rare break in the weather in East London in the middle of February. Becky Evans (aka Queen B) is taking me for a cruise around her adoptive manor in her new F80 BMW M3. “This is my ends, I love it here,”, she tells me as kids rocking hoodies do the double take as they cross the Bethnal Green Road, spying Becky, all butterfly lashes and raven locks, at the helm of her bright yellow beemer, that turbocharged six humming a bass note along the curb.
Off-road culture: True Automotive Freedom via the knobblies
The problem with roads is that they have rules. The good thing about offroad culture is that there aren’t as many.
Whether you like it or not the road is in itself a piece of administrative coercion. No matter what kind of machine you drive or ride the freedom these things represent is curtailed, limited, palsied. It’s one of the contradictory truths of international motoring.
This is directly contrary therefore to the huge majority of the aesthetic of marketing. The motoring industry universally tempts us with promises of freedom, transcendence. We are beckoned to this brand and that via a series of spurious images hardly any of which stand up to scrutiny in this crowded urban world.
This is, then, where the beauty of offroad riding and driving comes in. Sure, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Green Lanes, for example, have well-administered rules and regulations concerning what you can and cannot do.
Built to race – Aermacchi
The Aermacchi Harley Davidson Ala d’Oro is something of an enigma. It’s an Italian bike with an American name that was honed to perfection by a British importer. It’s also a bike out of its time; one built with a highly-developed 350cc air-cooled single-cylinder engine at a time when Japanese multi-cylinder bikes were beginning to […]
Trans Europe Express
The K1600 B isn’t like most cruisers; it isn’t even like most BMWs. Among the 35,000 visitors that have descended upon the picturesque town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen for annual BMW Motorrad Days, the black bagger garners plenty of attention as it purrs through the streets. You have to go back to 2004 to find the last […]
Forever Bikes
Ever owned something you just know you can never sell? When it comes to motorbikes, these people know them like the back of their hand. A back of hand they’ve spent thirty years staring at, as they twist an oh-so-familiar throttle. That’s because Bikesure Insurance has been seeking out incredible stories of people who have […]
MV Agusta Museum
One of the first names that would come to mind when you think of sports bikes would be MV Agusta, and visiting the museum, a few kilometres from Milan Malpensa airport, where MV Agusta was born, I’ve learned why it is said that “with an MV Agusta you can fly”. A story made of victories […]
Is this Britain’s most unusual motorcycle collection?
There’s nothing unusual about collecting motorcycles, but there’s something very unusual about Peter Frost’s eclectic stash of bikes gathered from across Europe. The haul of 10 bikes, from England’s Midlands to Russia, Poland, East Germany and Italy, complements an equally impressive collection of obscure, unconventional and rare cars. With a passion for cars and bikes […]
2017 Highlights
As 2017 comes to a close, we celebrate our most exciting, engaging and fun year to date. A year that saw incredible highs with a visit to the largest collection of MX-5s in the world, spending time with alt-fuel cars including the Toyota Mirai, a Porsche 911 converted to electricity and the world’s first Tesla […]
Barn Find Bikes
Damp, dewy air suffocates against the corners of the building, whistling under doors and rattling against every exposed finger. The weather is sour – there’s no other word for it – but the view spread before us couldn’t be much sweeter. Just over 50 classic bikes, ranging from the filigree frame of a 1930 Royal […]
25 Years of Fireblade Celebrated
Let loose to bikers around the globe in 1992, the performance marque would reach unchartered highs in its class and it would lead the Honda name to near mythological standing. To celebrate this quarter-of-a-century of Fireblade, Honda UK invited a select group of people, including yours truly, to Rockingham in Northamptonshire recently. I’m talking about […]