Easy ride down memory lane

By TIM WATKIN

Rhys Jones stands beside the moonlight chrome of a 1956 500cc BSA Gold Star DB34 - the bike that spawned the title "boy racer" - and ponders: "It's strange because people have said - I don't know how many times during their 100 years - that motorcycles won't last. They're inconvenient, you get cold and wet, you fall off and hurt yourself, yet they've never looked like disappearing. Every time there's a downturn in sales, something happens and they come back."

Around us a century of bikes are being polished and vacuumed as the Auckland Museum prepares for the opening of its full-throttle, grunt-celebrating summer exhibition, enthusiastically titled Vroom. Jones, managing editor of Motorcycle Trader magazine and one of the three-man team that selected the 80 bikes on display, is walking us through the machines, from the 1902 Adler that you could ride while still wearing your bowler hat, to the 21st-century BMW C1.

Jones smiles as we turn away from the Gold Star.

"Someone who says you get wet and cold and fall off is missing the point. There's something about riding a bike that's a challenge. You have to think differently."

And there seems to be no shortage of people who think that way. When Vroom's inspiration, The Art of the Motorcycle, opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1998 it drew record numbers of visitors and was heralded as a ground-breaking cultural event.

The motorbike has been a constant cultural companion through the 20th century, its invention predating the automobile by 25 years and the aeroplane by 36 years. With the industrial revolution won, Pierre Michaux and Louis-Guillaume Perreaux in 1868 attached a small steam engine to a bicycle which, it is said, reached a speed of 30 km/h. Gottlieb Daimler took the idea further in 1885 by fixing an internal-combustion engine to a wooden cycle frame.

But the motorbike has always been a sidecar of popular culture, speeding off down dirt tracks and away from the middle of the road, where the car has prevailed as the transporter of the masses.

Walking past the 1951 BSA Bantam D1, "one of the last British commuter bikes," Jones explains how postwar mass car production in Japan overhauled our transport habits.

"At the end of the 60s cars started to get cheaper and that started the shift away from bikes as commuters into what they are now, a leisure product."

Free of their utilitarian role, motorbikes have become a niche vehicle, carrying the causeless rebels and easyriders through films, the bohemians to their cafes, the students to campus and the bikers to gang headquarters.

As the Guggenheim enthused, "The motorcycle is an immortal cultural icon that changes with the times. More than speed, it embodies the abstract themes of rebellion, progress, freedom, sex and danger."

"That rebellious image was really American in origin," Jones says. Before the war, motorcycle gangs in Britain had been ordinary old bike enthusiasts. "Then after the Second World War, so the story goes, there were a lot of young American guys in their 20s coming back who had faced danger, and civilian life was a total bore to them. That's where the whole Hell's Angels thing came from.

"New Zealand and Australia followed that trend. I think they took it from movies like the Marlon Brando film, The Wild One. They wore black leather jackets, jeans and tattoos. That's fading at the moment, because I don't think most people under 40 relate to that any more. The average age of a person buying a bike over 750cc in the US is 38, and it's close to that here too."

A Kawasaki Z1 900cc catches his eye. Along with the Honda CB750, this was the first four-cylinder superbike. "This was a ground-breaking machine in New Zealand. And the whole world. They called it the king because it was the fastest bike on the road and it was that way right through the mid-70s. People like Graeme Crosby started racing on a chopped version of one of these."

Just across the way is the Suzuki T20. Such bikes were born when the Japanese snaffled a defecting East German who knew how to design two-stroke bike engines.

"There was a two-stroke revolution in the 60s and that one and the Yamaha RD250 sold like hot cakes in New Zealand. They were very fast."

At the same time, the far humbler scooter was revolutionising motorcycle sales.

"The Vespa, which was the first one, was designed in 1946 or 47," Jones says, looking over a 1961 SS90. An aircraft engineer was told to create a cheap two-wheel form of transport that could get Europeans - male and female - mobile again after the war.

"There's a spare wheel, no exposed parts or grease, you've got a bit of weather protection, a woman can wear a skirt. It's just designed by a man who wasn't thinking like a motorcycle designer."

In the next room is a seat-torn, paint-faded, 1961 Honda 50. It belonged to university student Helen Clark.

Jones: "Honda brought those out in the late 50s. They called it the Model T of the motorcycle world because it shifted a whole generation of Asians from bicycles to motorcycles. They made millions of them. There was a great slogan, 'You meet the nicest people on a Honda'." (Labour Party sloganeers for the next election, take note.)

But speed has always been a bigger seller in this "petrolhead country," as far back as the 1915, eight-valve Indian board track racer from the US.

One bike missing from the exhibition is the machine that Russell Wright powered to a motorcycle land speed record of 297.64 km/h in Christchurch in 1955. It's the only time the record has been held outside Europe or the US.

So where's the bike now?

"No one can find it. It was a Vincent HRD. Aunty Ethel's probably got it in a farmhouse somewhere and doesn't know what it is."

Asked which of all the bikes he'd most like to be photographed with, Jones chooses the 1997 Ducati 916 Senna Series, dedicated to formula one driver Ayrton Senna. Only a few hundred ever made, top speed 270 km/h.

"Motorcycle designers around the world say the 916 is probably the most beautiful bike ever designed. It's essentially very Italian. It's made to do two things - to go very fast and to stop. So it's got brilliant brakes, brilliant suspension and a superb engine."

If that's the kind of talk that spins your wheels, the exhibition opens on Thursday and runs until March 4.