Category: Uncategorized

I have just uploaded a page for Gino Bartali with a copy of a magazine, the whole of which is dedicated to a retrospective of Gino Bartal’s career.  He had a remarkably long career, mostly riding for Legnano, but ending on his own brand bikes, and won two Tours de France, with the longest ever gap between them – the first being before the Second World War and the second in 1948.  And there was this great rivalry with Fausto Coppi that had Italy divided.  Altogether an amazing racing cyclist.

I have just added a page for Wolsit with just a few details about the company.  I will add more when I can dig out my notes and collate them.  Also added is a circa 1950 Wolsit parts list.  This includes parts for all Wolsit models, a couple of which are racing bicycles – Mezzo Corsa (literally Half Race) and Corsa (Race)

I have just added some photos and bits of information on a recently acquired Motobecane Tour De France model frame.  It is a production frame that looks very much like the 1970-72 Bic Team bike frames. but I need more information in order to be able to say whether it is from that era or later.  I do know that Motobecane used the same decal style on later models, but I have not seen them on a later racing frame similar to this.  The jury is out.

Motobecane do not seem to be as well-documented as some other bicycle brands, so I would appreciate any information that anyone can provide – catalogue scans would be especially welcome.  I would be very pleased to receive anything that I can post on this website.

I have just uploaded an obituary of Brik Schotte, who died in 2004, on the Belgium page.  I found it in my files and thought that I really should include this sort of information on great factory racing cyclists.

I am not sure how this will turn out.  It started as a bicycle website, but there is just too much associated information of interest to leave it there, but I do not know where it will end.  If this site is primarily about factory racing bicycles, then information about the factories that produced them clearly has a place, as do the people who rode them.  Perhaps there needs to be some information on the components too.

I do not describe myself as a bicycle collector because that implies conducting a series of deliberate actions to acquire specific machines.  My accumulation of bicycles did not happen that way – I just acquired bicycles that resonated with me in a particular way and I have kept them so long as that resonance was there and I have disposed of a few when it faded.

I have also made the mistake of buying bikes because they were considered by others to be desirable – a Hetchins which I couldn’t get rid of soon enough; a Cinelli Super Corsa which was beautiful but left me cold; a couple of Gillotts, nice to look at and nice to ride but we just didn’t connect; a Carlton Flyer track the same.  But others enthuse about those bikes and rightly so – bicycles are a very personal thing and I expect many of you not to think particularly highly of the machines that I have accumulated.

My hope is that this site will develop into one with something for all enthusiasts of classic factory lightweight bicycles – I will steadily add my own bikes and then start adding other people’s so that we get a good cross-section of the world’s great bikes.

Stay tuned and please give me your comments on this site, good and bad, so that I can try to make it better.

 

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.