Welcome to my new website devoted to the great classic factory lightweight bicycles that have provided so much pleasure and good racing over the years. My particular passion is for factory replicas of the bikes ridden to victory in the Tour de France and I seem to have accumulated several without actually setting out to do so. Their details will be added to this site:
- Frejus SuperCorsa (Ferdie Kubler – 1950)
- Helyett Speciale (Jacqes Anquetil – 1957, 1961, 1962)
- Eddy Merckx Molteni (Eddy Merckx – 1971, 1972, 1974)
- Motobecane Bic Team (Luis Ocana – 1973)
- Peugeot PY10 (Bernard Thevenet – 1975, 1977)
- Gitane (Lucien Van Impe – 1976; Bernard Hinault – 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982)
- Raleigh (Joop Zoetemelk – 1980)
That list indicates that I have got the years 1971 through 1982 fairly well covered. Admittedly there were some specification changes over the yearts so that my bikes are not 100% representative of every one, but I have only shown the years for which the specifications were fairly similar – for example, Laurent Fignon won theTour in 1983 on a Gitane, but by then the spec had moved on from the bikes riden by Van Impe and Hinault, so I have not included his victory. I cheated a bit with Anquetil because my bike is a 1959 model with cable operated Simplex LJ23 front shifter. In 1957, Anquetil was using a rod operated front shifter and in 1961 and 1962 he had moved on to Simplex’ new parallelogram rear derailleur, the JuyRecord 61, from the Simplex 543 model fitted to my bike. The ads even say that in 1962 he rode some stages with Simplex’ new Delrin Prestige rear derailleur.