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Did you go along to Stafford for the Mechanics show, or to give it its Sunday name the 20th Carole Nash
Classic Motorcycle Mechanics Show? I did, okay so, no surprise there as I work for the company that puts the
show on. However, a visit to Stafford was an eagerly awaited trip even before I took up the offer of a job there. In fact I’ve been heading to Stafford and the show’s predecessor at Belle Vue in Manchester almost since Alan Whitehead had the bold idea that a show for old motorcycles would work. I missed the first one as I was in France at the Bol d’Or when it was at the Paul Ricard circuit near Marseilles. But since those days in the early 1980s the show has been a regular fixture in my calendar. There’s been a change or two along the way of course and it was suggested in the early days that the term classic was kept for things such as Vincents, Broughs, Manx Nortons and that sort of motorcycle. One such journalistic commentator confidently predicted Triumph twins and the like would ‘never really be classic as there was thousands of the things lying around’. If you don’t believe me dig out an early classic mag and read it for yourself. Since then, personal likes and dislikes aside, we have all come to realise how wide a blanket the term classic is. Nowadays all sorts of machines, once dismissed as worthless, now fit into the classic designation. What hasn’t changed are the restorers. We have essentially remained the same even if the machinery we rebuild hasn’t. Tim