It’s impossible to predict where any of the motorcycles on the preceding pages will be decades from now. By then, some might have established permanent residence in the pantheon of all-time great bikes. Others will at least have earned a place in collectors’ hearts, as the three bikes here have. They were among the top attractions—and subjects of some of the highest bids—at a Bonhams auctionin England in April.
1938 BROUGH SUPERIOR 982cc SS100
Sold for 157,700 pounds (about $232,000)
England’s Brough Superior was dubbed the Rolls-Royce of motorcycles because its bikes were so well engineered and well built—and, perhaps, because they were so expensive. In the 1920s and ’30s, when the average weekly salary in England was about three pounds, a Brough Superior cost from 130 pounds to 180 pounds.
That was not out of the price range of T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, who owned seven Brough Superiors during his lifetime, including the SS100 on which he crashed and died, in 1935. Brough Superior’s connection with Lawrence has contributed to the marque’s appeal to collectors.
The SS100 was a custom-built machine assembled from parts made by a variety of suppliers. The company built about 380 SS100s from 1924 until 1940, when it stopped producing motorcycles and began manufacturing aircraft components. Each SS100 came with a written guarantee that it had achieved a speed of faster than 100 mph in a quarter-mile test run.
1938 MOTO GUZZI 498cc GTC/L
Sold for 41,100 pounds (about $61,000)
The GTC/L (L stands for leggera, Italian for lightweight) was one of Moto Guzzi’s earliest production racing bikes. In 1938 it superseded the prewar GTC, which was the company’s first production racer. The GTC/L was followed a year later by the Condor, a production racer that achieved a great deal of success on the track.
This GTC/L, originally built for the Italian highway patrol, was apparently refitted in 1939 at the factory with the lightweight parts that distinguished the Condor from the GTC/L.
After the upgrade, the bike was sold to Moto Guzzi’s distributor in Ethiopia, or Abyssinia, as the country was then named. Italy had invaded Abyssinia in 1935 and annexed it as Italian East Africa. It’s unlikely that the bike was ever raced, because it retained all of its original road equipment—lights, toolbox, kick-starter—parts that normally were removed for competition.
The owner who sold this motorcycle at the Bonhams auction found it in India in 1990, where, it is assumed, a British soldier brought it from Ethiopia after Italy’s defeat in World War II. According to a previous owner, at one time this motorcycle, along with a Moto Guzzi Albatross, belonged to the maharaja of Patiala.
1950 VINCENT 998cc SERIES-C RAPIDE
Sold for 30,475 pounds (about $45,000)
The Series C Rapide wasn’t quite as fast as the Black Shadow, its Vincent contemporary that earned the title of the world’s fastest production motorcycle by achieving a top speed of 125 mph. But like all Vincents, the Rapide still moved quite rapidly, reaching close to 120 mph. It also cost twice as much as most other motorcycles of that era.
This Rapide had been owned by the same family for nearly four decades and underwent a complete restoration over the course of eight years, from 1985 through 1993.