naked twister

boring old stafford. the biggest classic bike show in the world, why would you want to be anywhere else at the end of april? me and dangerous made our annual pilgrimage to rural staffordshire today, a lot quiter than previous years, talking to some of the traders revealed that saturday had been stupid busy which came as a blessing because when stafford is busy it can become a tad claustrophobic. dodging the showers, drinking tea and just revelling in old bikes, whats not to like about it? no bargains to speak of, [apart from a ruck of stainless off 'stainless steve'  for a bargain thirty quid, three tins of brake cleaner at two english pounds a tin and topping up the machinable nylon stock for a fiver] loads of great stuff, loads of not-so-great stuff, some nice people, a lot of wankers and the usual chancers trying to extort vast amounts of cash from the unwary showgoers, just a typical classic bike show i guess, anyway, late afternoon, crowds thinning and my heart skips a beat when i spot the jim cray bmw boxer racer on one of the stands, this bike was the one that jim built to take on the mighty triumph triples and was actually laughed at when they turned up to race in the crmc series, the frame was found in a skip at motorworks and jim built a championship winning bike out of bits lying around in his workshop, his rider, the late paul hogan smashed the opposition on this bike, not only the crmc championship but the kent combine racing series in the same year! talking to jim recently revealed just how much that this bike put the cat amongst the pigeons, there were a lot of very unhappy mega-money triple owners kicking off at their tuners when a shonky old bmw twin was suddenly making them look very silly indeed! digging back through my photo albums i came across the last two pic's, if you look carefully you can see the bike in the fifth photo, from the left is my bmw cafe racer, next to that is another race bike, then a lovely motorsport painted roadbike, just in front you can see the aluminium tank and screen of the cray/hogan bike, bottom pic shows another view of the motorsport bike, the 'ten' racer and my cafe racer, holy shit, checking out the date on the back of the photo's and they are 1994, twenty years ago, where did that time go? just goes to show that some of us were building nice bikes before bikeefix, bikeshed, trendy internet sites and all that old bollocks anyway...........