Category: History

Archive: Alfredo, 1996

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Alfredo Mar, Niagara Rally, 1996

I did an interview the other day with Karen for the awesome Kickstart magazine, and it got me thinking about how long i’ve been doing this (12+ years!), and all the great people I’ve met through 2strokebuzz and scootering. I started digging through some old shoeboxes tonight and thought it might be fun to start posting some photos and stories from the old days.

There’s no better person to start with than Alfredo Mar. When I bought my first scooter in 1995, Alf was the first person I met on Usenet, and a few days later, the first scooterist I met in person. I remember seeing him in front of Arturo’s Tacos on his mirrored-out P200 in pressed slacks and a tennis sweater with a weird laurel where the alligator should be, and feeling entirely inadequate with my rusty Primavera, dirty jeans and biker jacket, but within seconds of talking to him, I knew we’d be friends. We’re still best friends, and our daughters are, too. This photo is from Niagara 1996, our first major road trip. (Check out Rich Easton lying down in the background.) Alf bought that burgundy P200 from Vespa of Chicago when he went away to college, but it’s been in my garage so long (I’ve moved with it twice!) I think I might have common-law ownership.

Motogiro d’California

Motogiro d’Italia is a motorcycle touring rally made famous in the 1950s and revived in 2001.  The event, showcasing classic Italian machines, is venturing outside Italy for the first, of what I would imagine will be annual, Motogiro America. The oil leaking event will be held in and around Monterey, CA preceding the Red Bull U.S. Grand Prix in July 2008.  Webbikeworld.com reports that the routes will include a lap around the racetrack at Laguna Seca as well as scenic rides around the picturesque Monterey Bay area.  There is a range of entry classes including a “Vespa Class.” Hopefully other vintage Italian scooters will be allowed as it would seem very fitting to have some of the beautiful Lambretta D race machines participating (I’m talking to you, Alex).  It sounds like a dream week for any Italian Iron enthusiast.

Peel microcar video and Hammacher Schlemmer

POC Phil posted this must-watch Peel Trident & P50 minicar video as a comment to my microcar book review, but it deserved a more prominent link. In the sixties you could buy a two-seater car made on the Isle of Man for £200 but these days a similarly-sized Chinese electric car costs $25,000. Nitro sent that Hammacher Schlemmer link, along with this $6000 2-person scooter coupe. He says “Imagine if you changed the cheap Chinese subframe for maybe a kitted 125 or so.” I guess, or you could buy an MP3 for the same price.

Review: A-Z of Popular Scooters and Microcars

The A-Z of Popular Scooters and Microcars, Cruising with StyleThe A-Z of Popular Scooters and Microcars, Cruising with Style, by Michael Dan
Veloce Books, 2007
Paperback, 256 pages
ISBN 9781845840884

The peak of the current “scooter boom” (surely it can’t get any bigger?) has been marked by an ever-growing number of books, each more general than the last. Most of the current scooter books are targeted at wheel-kicking neophytes, and some were clearly written by folks that have never straddled a 150cc engine. Even books targeted towards scenesters, like Colin Shattuck’s great Scooters: Red Eyes, Whitewalls & Blue Smoke have their faults; listings of events, models, and clubs are outdated soon after publication and there’s just not enough space to do justice to the diverse range of subjects covered. Few scooter books find an engaging “hook” and really focus on it, and too many books rely on fifth-hand recycled historical boilerplate, most of it simply re-hashing Piaggio’s self-scripted mythology.

On the opposite extreme, Veloce’s books are (hurrah!) written by anoraks for anoraks, and while The A-Z of Popular Scooters and Microcars, Cruising with Style perhaps isn’t quite as slick-looking as other new books on the market, it seems likely to appeal to a fanatical scooter/microcar owner or someone wishing to just skim the surface. It’s great to find a book written from first-hand personal experience. Michael Dan is a solid writer who clearly loves and respects his subject matter. He fills the book with engaging stories of his exploits in the fifties riding various tiny-wheeled contraptions. Doubling the subject matter by throwing microcars into the mix seems like a bad move, focus-wise, but this book is probably the first to explore the connections between these two “niche” vehicles, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a devotee of either who lacked (at least) a passing interest in the other, so it’s a smart combination. Dan discusses the connections in detail: not only did many companies produce microcars and scooters concurrently, there was also crossover in the transportation market and the rally scene. Microcars were also a popular upgrade for scooterists finding themselves with a larger income and/or family.

The book starts with a brief overview of its subjects, building a historical context for the machines we love and the scenes that developed around them. The next section, and the most pleasant reading, goes into more detail on several specific models, featuring photos, ephemera, and the author’s first-hand period anecdotes from fifties Britain. This section is followed by nearly 100 pages of “A-Z” listings, featuring three scooters or microcars per page with specifications and notes about each model. The listings aren’t slavishly comprehensive, but they feature a good mix of the common vs. the obscure, with scooters and microcars from around the world, from the forties to the current day.

After the listings, Dan has assembled simple but great feature: a series of timelines, sorting popular marques and models by decade. The timelines put the models and their development in a temporal context with their contemporaries, depicting booms and draughts. A photo gallery fills the remaining 25 pages, bringing the book to 256 pages, each packed tight with scooter and microcar goodness.

Veloce’s design and typography is a bit disappointing. A $60 book simply deserves a bit more care in that department. Veloce seems to follow the Scootering magazine school of jamming as much photography and text on the page as possible, using wacky angles, drop shadows, repeated images, stretched type, goofy oversized captions, and similar “corporate newsletter” design traps. A simpler, cleaner design would serve the information better. Stranger still are the shots where a scooter or car was digitally added to an idyllic landscape, surely they didn’t think they were fooling anyone? Aside from those quibbles, the printing and binding is top-quality, and most of the photography is solid. The period ephemera is tops–ads and brochures we’ve never seen before, reproduced very cleanly. The majority of the “A-Z” section features snapshots taken at swap meets and car shows. If you’re expecting big-budget Art of the Motorcycle-style portraits of hundreds of models, you’re not going to find them here, these are real-world machines in various states of repair, restoration, or decay, and the eBay-auction-style photos are actually an engaging way to present them.

A trivia-obsessed scooterist might debate a few finer points of the text, but there’s certainly nothing blatantly wrong, which can’t be said for many of the ‘scooter boom’ cash-ins on the market. Assuming that the microcar data is similarly sound, this book is perfect for a devotee of either vehicle, and a great bridge between two scenes that don’t communicate much, but share many common elements. Any vintage scooter fan won’t be disappointed with this book, the scooter information is fresh and personal, and the microcar content offers instant immersion in an unexplored, parallel world.

More info available at Veloce’s site.

News chunks 10/23/07

  • A Korean student in England decided riding his scooter back to Korea would be less uncomfortable than a 13-hour flight.
  • The Times of London is digging the new Vespa S. Current rumor is 50cc and 150cc versions to the U.S. in the spring.
  • The Age of Melbourne, on the other hand, may be the first media outlet to see through the façade of Piaggio’s “green” marketing, after receiving a life-sized non-recyclable promotional piece featuring the MP3. Australia is hot for scooters this month. A University of Tasmania team has assembled the first Australian-made hybrid scooter, powered by Ethanol and batteries, and Sydney is apparently searching for its identity as a scooter city.
  • The Sun rides Aprilia’s new Mana 850cc automatic motorcycle.
  • Leonardo DiCaprio’s ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend sideswiped a photographer’s scooter in Israel. Oh, sorry, that’s not even interesting to E! Online readers.
  • If you’ve always thought “Sure, Segways are great, but man, I hate standing up, and I wish they were uglier, lower-tech, and more expensive,” Toyota has a concept vehicle for you.
  • In London suburb Croydon, citizens are teaming up to document “antisocial” scootering and report it to police in the wake of the death of a local police officer.
  • D.C. police are on the other side of the fence, after a scooter cop was hit-and-run by a white van. (Fact: recklessly-driven white vans now outnumber all other vehicles on Chicago streets, 6-to-1.)
  • For some reason there were at least… let’s see… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… five stories in the press last week about Piaggio’s new plant in Vietnam, without any new info beyond the announcement they made in February. Thanh Nien News had the decency to follow up their PR-wire story with a fairly interesting story on the vintage scooter scene in Vietnam.
  • A New Jersey yoga instructor and mother of six becomes the first woman in America to eat thousands of dollars of depreciation and trade in her SUV, replacing it with a $11,000 Vectrix electric scooter. The expense is totally justified by her reduced carbon footprint and the dozens of dollars she’ll save on gas between now and the first day it snows and she has to make six separate trips to drop her kids off at soccer practice, girl scouts, and karate. Yes, that’s pretty cynical. As Smarthouse points out, the Vectrix has many merits, and it’s a positive step for ecology, but as I’ve said many times, it seems that consumers aren’t considering all the factors when looking at the economic benefits of scooters, like this Wisconsin couple who seem to be ignoring the fact that riding a pair of 60mpg scooters isn’t really any better than driving one 30mpg car.
  • In that same story an Oshkosh, WI urgent-care clinic director estimates that scooter-related urgent-care visits will rise to 5,000 nationally this year, up from 1,300 in 2000. If the national urgent-care industry is actually keeping stats like that, we’d love to see them, but it seems a little unlikely that anyone would have been accurately tracking nationwide motorscooter injuries in 2000, or that any study of that sort would differentiate urgent-care visits from emergency-room visits.
  • A new SYM dealer has opened shop on the Incriminators’ turf. “You see them all over Hollywood,” store manager Tonya Stewart says, “[Scooters are] in movies and music videos, and stars are riding them as well.” Well, sure, Tonya, but those aren’t really SYMs now are they? God, I’m bitchy tonight. This is like 2strokeTMZ.

Disc bragging rights: Laverda 1, Lambretta 0

It has been claimed that the Lambretta motorscooter was a pioneering machine by having been the first production two-wheeled vehicle to have a disc brake. While I believe the Lambretta model C to be the distilled essence of what a scooter is all about, the typical Lambrettista has very high smugness-to-running-scooter ratio. It is possible that Lambretta’s reputation for pushing boundaries lends some fuel to this imbalanced view of the vintage small displacement world. So to help bring balance to the world, we present evidence to refute this oft-repeated claim to a technological first. Continue reading “Disc bragging rights: Laverda 1, Lambretta 0”

Mark Knopfler: Mod or not?

From Matt: “Who knew Mark Knopfler was a Mod?”

Well, pre-mod, maybe. From the ex-Dire-Straits guitarist’s bio:

The artwork for “Kill To Get Crimson” evokes one of the periods in Knopfler’s own palette for the album. “For the cover, I’ve chosen a picture painted in 1958, it has a West Indian girl who wants to buy a red scooter,â€? he continues. “This is pre-mod, and the L-plate hasn’t changed to this day. I’ve got a red scooter, and it’s amazing, it looks pretty much exactly the same. That time was very interesting from the point of view of a musician, a kid at that time.

I seem to remember seeing him lumped in with Rod Stewart, Marc Bolan, and David Bowie as an “ex-Mod” somewhere, but can’t find any reference now as to if he actually ran with the Mod crowd as a teenager, and if so, what his old friends have to say about the entire decade he spent wearing a terrycloth headband.

Vintage Lambretta Service films

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Bongiorno, customer-a, Have-a you seen-a our new-a model?

Amazing vintage scooter videos continue to surface on YouTube. This time, scootr99 deserves the credit for unleashing two English-dubbed films released by Innocenti in the sixties. The first is a complete Lambretta Li150 Series III stripdown (parts 1, 2, 3, and 4). The second is even more interesting, a guide to opening and setting up an offical Lambretta sales and service facility (parts 1, 2, and 3). Most scooter dealers could learn a thing or two from both videos. (Thanks for the links, ajuda.scooterpt.com)