Another view looking down the left hand lane, with the headlight to Vesty's 1982 British championship winning Sherpa just showing on the right hand side of the photo.
Here is Steve Saunders 1982 Bultaco. This is the bike that very nearly beat me back in the Colmore all those years ago and put Steve in the minds of the top competitors. Charles Coulthard rode this bike at the Alvie 2 day trial, 3 years ago. This is not the original petrol tank. I have the original but the stickers have bubbled.
Would you like to take some of these restored bikes out and ride them ?
You can't. .. Well you can ... but I'll explain. This Bultaco comes with the first ever experimental Michelin Tyres. I was the first ever rider to use these tyres. You see the problem lies in that these tyres are all hard and will have to come off to fit good tyres for riding. As they are now hard, they would not come off the rims too easily. Alternatively you need to have spare wheels but you have the added problem as some of these bikes have fibre glass tanks and you couldn't use the tanks because modern fuel would destroy them.
Also these handlebar grips are the very original renthal grips, they are hard now and would not be the best grips to use in competition. If I managed to get these grips off how would I be able to get them back on again without destroying them. So in order to ride these bikes, you need to be able to swap a lot of things, so hence I think it is better to ride replica bikes or tribute bikes, whatever you want to call them, which are not the originals because of the problems I have mentioned.
Practically all of these bikes have a correct tyres fitted. I use different tyres in different years and they are represented in my collection here correctly on the correct bikes. Around this time I only used Dunlop's on the front and Pirelli's on the rear. You cannot get these. You cannot go and buy them there is no way you can just say can I buy a couple of these please. They just don't exist. They haven't been in production for decades.
And what is the relevance of the teddy bear ?
Oh Diane gave that to me.
And what is the relevance of the teddy bear ?
Oh Diane gave that to me.