The Jockey Journal

No doubt about it, the Cafe Racer style was born on the island of England in the 1950s. Leather Boys and teas sippers blasted from motor cafe to motor cafe on cold, rainy nights on zippy bikes made from the best parts. Take a Norton slimline Featherbed frame and Roadholder front end and put in a Triumph 650 motor, a far superior motor to the Nortons of the time. Leave in the Burman gearbox for its strength and add a bunch of alloy components for lightening the whole thing up and you got class and speed. The above is a pretty fair example, although I love my Trumpet motors.

But lets say we fast forward thirty or forty years and see what the cafe racer has evolved into . Now we have shinier paints, we have four cylinder motors and tricky magnetos and sticky tires… disk brakes too. You may have seen a cool cafe job that the Garage Company created about a year ago:

But here is a crazy new one I spotted today at the Long Beach Swap Meet. All of it in the same vein, but a little different:

This bike has the cafe style in spades, it just does not have the Norton frame. Actually there is probably a Honda frame underneath this thing, but it has been cut up a little bit. A lot has been taken away from this bike, and a lot has been added, and all of it in the right places.

Crazy, machined struts, engine turned stuff all over, vintage Hallcraft disk brakes are all here. This is the neo stuff.

The low slung butt stop seat, the cafe bars and the rearset pegs are all part of the tradition of the Cafe Racer, this paint job, instead of hand hammered alloy tank is all neo-style. Cool to boot.

This bike is all part of the tradition of the cafe racer, but with a new twist. I think it rocks.