3 x World Trials champion , yjro Vesterinen's motorcycle collection  - Page 1

In 2015 Retrotrials.com was lucky enough to interview the Trials first Multiple World Champion winner, Yrjo Vesterinen. This detailed interview spanning much of Yrjo's life is recorded elsewhere on this web. After years of competition on the trials circuit had finished, Vesty concentrated on the World of business and grew Apico from an idea into the Wholesale industry giant it is today. As time progressed Vesty experienced a rekindled interest in the Trial sport and especially the motorcycles of his younger days and others of real note.

Many years later, Yrjo now has one of the finest collections of factory competition off road motorcycles anywhere.

Interviewing Vesty without featuring gorgeous photographs of his wonderful collection, would be like writing in detail about Stan Laurel without mentioning Oliver Hardy.....it's just not right.

So, when the time was right, Retrotrials revisited Vesty to photograph his terrific collection once the white sheets had been removed and things were looking just right.

So ...here we are .....in a high place ...somewhere, on a bright spring morning.

​ The sun had come out and it made a great day even better.

3 x World Trials champion , Yjro Vesterinen's motorcycle collection www.retrotrials.com

Vesty's knowledge .....and even greater still, his attention to detail  promised that this would be a visit to remember. This isn't a museum, it is simply Vesty's private collection. Where most of us inhabit sheds, or a garage and have perhaps 2 or 3 motorcycles .....Vesty has taken it to the next level. Whilst we might have a clue .... unless this collection has been seen, it's very difficult to imagine how fine it is.

3 x World Trials champion , Yjro Vesterinen's motorcycle collection www.retrotrials.com

3 x World Trials champion , Yjro Vesterinen's motorcycle collection www.retrotrials.com

Welcome.

It's time for a guided tour by the 3 times Trials World champion Yrjo Vesterienen.

This written tour is not a jumbled recreation of my own bad memory following my visit.

This tour is in Vesty's words. 

3 x World Trials champion , Yjro Vesterinen's motorcycle collection www.retrotrials.com

This is off road motorcycle equivalent of the Science Museum and the Victorian and Albert Museum rolled into one.
Where shall we start......

3 x World Trials champion , Yjro Vesterinen's motorcycle collection www.retrotrials.com

This is my 1982 British championship winning machine. At this point we were experimenting with different shock mounting points and we finalize it on this machine and through Comerfords who were the importers of Ohlins shocks. They got in touch with the owners and they made a few experimental pairs and it's like this. They were all experimental and they weren't sold to the public at all.

3 x World Trials champion , Yjro Vesterinen's motorcycle collection www.retrotrials.com

These handlebars were made especially for me by Henry Rosenthal at Renthal handlebars. He made them for for me with the 3 bolt clamp which was not standard at the time. He claimed at the time that this was too expensive to put into production. Personally I thought it couldn't have cost a lot of money, but not in his eyes. It was not a commercial thing for me, it was the only way to stabilize the handlebars because on renthal bars they use to creak and the clamps used to move. It's because of this that I came up with this idea of a third bolt on the crossbar. Another thing that we were doing was drilling out the top yoke so you are able to move the forks up and down in the yokes which was not standard .This became standard on various bikes, later over the years. We tried various different bike general geometries but this was the bike in 1982, the bike that we ended up being happy with. A lot of the other things were just personal preference. I wanted to have the gear lever closer to my foot so we just bended the gear pedal to achieve this. We also tried different cylinders and different cylinder heads with different compressions and different portings.

3 x World Trials champion , Yjro Vesterinen's motorcycle collection www.retrotrials.com

This bike has also got the sticky tyres that were all individually numbered you could not buy these tyres. This is one of the original tyres that I still had from this time. There was a black market for these tyres as well. I once swapped one tyre with Pete Cartwright in North Yorkshire. He was desperate for a tyre and I ended up with one used tyre that wasn't recorded so I swapped it with him for something, I can't remember what. The tyre was that good that he drove all the way from Kilburn in North Yorkshire down to me in London to pick the tyre up and round back the same day, so he did a 10 hour round drive for one used tyre. 

3 x World Trials champion , Yjro Vesterinen's motorcycle collection www.retrotrials.com

But then the following weekend he very nearly beat me, so I wouldn't give him any more tyres. You see who ever had these tyres had a massive advantage. The front wasn't as necessary, but they were numbered as well. You can see the numbers on the tyres here. This is the individual numbering and they had a book where they recorded all of the tyres that they handed out and I needed to give this tyre back to get another one in the future. It was recorded very strictly. The letters here Z and E meant how soft the compound was. But it wasn't just the compounds there were also variations in the carcasses as well on this bike. 

3 x World Trials champion , Yjro Vesterinen's motorcycle collection www.retrotrials.com

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