Scootering Magazine May 2015

Win riding gear worth over

30

Misfit a Yorkshire

CELEBRATING

£700!

years of

oddity #347 May 2015

RETURN

10

of the

Scooter

ROSA BIANCAS

essentirally als to

Classic DTC Lambrettas

pack

TESTED



Plus

80s vs 00s

Norrie Kerr rides the Vespas

FIRST RIDE Casa Lambretta SS225 tested



Return of Mick Da Mod, Exile to Exiled, Custom shows, Las Vegas & Morecambe rallies, scooter news, reviews & more!

CoNteNts 03From the Archive 06Kickstart Rhapsody and Blues, 1988.

– 92Tested Casa SS225 Kit

We ride the latest Lambretta tuning kit from Italy, and check out its dyno graphs.

Welcome to the informative front section of Scootering, jam-packed full of useful stuff from news and reviews to products tested, opinions, readers’ letters, music reviews and plenty more besides.

Scooters – 98Staff Vespa Rat Rod Part 3

16Competition!

100Specialist Services

Win riding gear from Shoei, Spada and Caburg worth over £700 in total!

22Another competition!

Win tickets and accommodation for DISC 30 worth over £250!

of the 30Return Rosa Bianca

The DTC street racer was both a common sight during the 1980s and Maca’s own No. 1 Lambretta featured in issue 1 of Scootering.

And now there’s a new one!

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125cc Road Test – Vespa Vs Vespa

Norrie Kerr revisits the geared Vespa P125 ETS and compares it to a modern automatic Primavera 125.

44

Sublime

A stunning Lambretta TV175 Series 2 with just the right amount of period accessories.

Richie investigates wiring and cabling his project 1950s Douglas Vespa.

Not yet finished your winter project? Whatever you need, from platers to tuners, engineers to painters, fabricators to upholsterers, you’ll find them all here. Hopefully.

Scooter 10210 Rally Essentials

Things that you shouldn’t leave home without.

105

Scooter Trader

Classified and business advertising, for all your scootering needs.

122Time Machine

An 80s inspired Series 3 custom Lambretta, complete with recycled period engraving.

128BSSO Scooter Racing The 2015 season kicks off at Croft with a whole load of group shuffling and new scooters.

Show Us Your 130Scoots!

49 54Antwerp Custom Show 132Various events 58Morecambe pre-season rally 140Numero Indici Club do’s & events

A calendar of scooter related events

Belgium’s season opener.

Your pictures of your rides that we publish.

From Las Vegas to Dorset and more.

VFM-organised shindig in the north west.

A very tidy Vespa street racer, based around a PX125 with a tweaked motor.

64The VMSC Show

146Into The Sunset

A fine selection of obscure classics and modern customs at the Vintage club’s premier event.

72Scarborough Scooter Rally

Didn’t we all have a lovely Easter weekend folks?

Apart from the fog and rain on the Friday ride up.

– 80Misfit A Yorkshire Oddity

Indeed it is. Two sets of bars, three wheels, four seats and at least five people on board!

The 8th Classic 88 and Automatic Scooter Show

Some marvellous scooters in Cologne!

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Your scootering tales from time long ago. Keep them coming please folks, we need to replenish our stock!

Next Month!

Scootering continues to celebrate it’s 30th birthday with the chance for to win a Lambretta GP200 AND take part in a road test on it. Yes, the lucky winner will feature in a Scootering photoshoot riding and writing about their competition prize!

ALSO Sticky takes an exclusive look inside the rare Innocenti Lambretta twin cylinder prototypes, we’ll have a review of Westonsuper-Mare rally and LOADS more too!

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122

44 140 p36

www.scootering.com | 5

Vespa Thirty years ago Norrie Kerr road-tested the then-new Vespa P125 ETS for Scootering magazine.A short lived smallframe model that has gained a small fanbase in recent years, Iggy took Norrie back to the 80s to see how the ETS has stood the test of time‌

P125 ETS Revisited

How does it compare to a new Vespa Primavera?

Sublime If ever there was a name fit for a scooter it has to be the one that Lee Maxey’s fiancée,Tina, christened this TV175 with when she saw the finished machine for the first time. In a word, it is sublime.

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dmittedly accessories aren’t to everybody’s taste and they don’t suit all scooters. For instance, I think a modern GTS certainly looks odd wearing a full set of 60s-inspired chrome garnishing, but each to their own. Equally there are scooters that have been carefully lavished with period goodies that are very well suited. This Series 2 Lambretta TV175 fits nicely into that latter category.

Over the last decade or so scooter fashion and trends have changed somewhat. I dare bet that there have been more aftermarket lights, mirrors, racks, aerials, horns, Florida and crash bars sold in the last 15 years than there were in the 1960s. But strangely enough, buying a bargain bucket of cheap chrome from a parts fair and throwing it from the other side of a muddy field in a vain hope that it’ll stick to your magnetic Vespa PX and automatically look stunning is a big ask.

The 16thAntwerp

InternationalScooter Show With the weather looking good forAntwerp – well far better than usual for this time of year – we loaded up and headed for Dover and a motel after work onThursday night so we could get the early ferry en route to the 16th annual international scooter custom show atAntwerp.

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rriving at our digs in Antwerp city centre, our group of five had a fairly event-free ride there. One scooter suffered a minor heat-seize on some new rings and another lost all lights but nothing major and, at least, no snow.

The meet and greet drink at the lively city centre bar/cafe Kapitein Zeppos was fairly light on scooterists but as usual Tim and Jurgen were there buying the drinks, with a Lambretta Model D on display in there all weekend. Later on some went to the first night of a boss reggae/rocksteady weekender being held in parallel with the scooter weekender in the city, but a long day and a few very strong beers saw us turning in around 1am.

Saturday’s ride out met as usual outside Zeppos’ and a group of around 25 scooters headed through the maze of the city over tram tracks and cobbles and out into the suburbs. All good fun and about 45 minutes later we arrived at a very original Belgian bar from the 1930s with plenty of vintage signage and fittings.

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After a couple of drinks with the ever-hospitable hosts of the weekender, we headed back into the city for a meal and to get ready for the night’s entertainment. A very amusing and lubricated local kept us entertained in a bar until around midnight when we headed for the evening do when we realised how late it was. An unlikely looking character in a smart blazer and specs, he was a hilarious p*ss artist.

The night’s entertainment was at a different venue to normal (the reggae weekender being held in the now usual de Kleine hedonist bar venue). Polly Goes Psycho – Scooter Edition was held at cafe Kiebooms, a great run down Art Deco bar venue in a dodgy part of the city, and with free entry there were plenty of characters in with the sweaty throng dancing to quality Northern, R&B ,70s reggae, soul, disco, Blow-Up sounds and the floor was busy, certainly while we were there until around 3.30am The show on the Sunday was back at the Royal Antwerp FC stadium. A little thin on the ground custom scoot wise it has to

be said, but still there were plenty of stalls and some interesting machines on display from unusual vintages from the Cigales Scooter Club to a superbly restored Vespa U model and a firebreathing small frame street racer, among the vintage Vespas and Lambrettas.

There were some jumble stalls outside too, Lambrettafinder Sam de Coussemaker also had a stall, and for those after a complete bike some restos were on sale.

With a night in Bruges beckoning, we headed off later and after arriving in another beautiful city were soon out for a relaxing beer and bite to eat before catching up on some sleep. A quick tour in the morning to a famous Belgian First World War site at Diksmuide (via all the roadworks and diversions in Belgium it seemed!), then the ferry at Dunkerque and Blighty bound. Another great weekender in Antwerp and thanks to Tim and Jurgen for their dedication and hard work organising it.

Ben Ford

scarborough scooter rally BRSA #1 EASTER,2015

Brighton may be thought of as the spiritual home of the original Mods, but for scooterists there’s a town in the north east ofYorkshire that is much more historically important – from a scooter rally point of view at least.

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carborough is a place where many attended their first scooter run after the 1979 Quadrophenia revival, and where many of them found a place in the cells after the exuberance of youth landed them in a bit of bother.

In fact, so many young Mods and fledgling scooter boys were arrested in 1980 that the police ran out of handcuffs and legend has it that a well-known local scooterist’s police dog handler dad used plastic tie-wraps as make do handcuffs for the very first time; a practice that is now used in large scale disruptive situations around the world. It seems the British scooter scene is actually responsible for a lot more than we give it credit for…

Thankfully, the fight has gone out of most of us now; fisticuffs and plasticuffs aren’t such an important part of a rally. As a result, not only do formerly hostile towns allow us to have rallies there, but they welcome us (and the scooterist pound) with open tills.

72 | scootering | MAY 2015

I was too young to be in Scarborough in 1980, but eight years later I rode my brand new red Vespa T5 to a rally there for the very first time. Who’d have thought that 27 years (long enough for Nelson Mandela to do a prison stint) and numerous Scarborough rallies later I’d still be doing it and feeling as excited as ever on Good Friday?

For this Bank Holiday, God decided to replace lovely sunshine with wet, miserable and cold weather for my 120-mile dash to the seaside. Our posse of well-moistened fellow club members and various waifs and strays made good time with nothing more than a minor grass tracking incident for my other half to worry about as we made our way via the foggy and not so scenic route to the seaside.

Arriving in good time, we found that the wide pavement around the centrally located Grand Hotel was already overflowing with scooters. The evening turned into a late one around town before we headed down to the Spa for the last hour of VFM’s evening do for a late drink and a catch up with friends.

Saturday was thankfully much brighter, although the previous day’s fog had settled in my poorly thumping head, but I was up and at ’em for an early trip to the custom show before the hordes of rally goers and daytrippers turned the access road and promenade into a no-go zone later in the day. Looking around the show the DTC boys put on a fantastic display of classic street racer Lammies, which was good to see.

The latest Insane Innovations creation was also hard to miss; it’s a huge, long and wide Series 2 Lambretta with GTS 250 engine, hydraulic rear end and more tricks up its well-engineered sleeves than we can list here.

On my return later in the afternoon the trophies were handed out with ‘Best Ridden’ getting the biggest cheers; it went to a scooter that has been around forever and still looks as good now as it did back in the day, a scooter that is as important to the history of the scene as the town itself – Sign of the Snake.

High Rollers Rally LasVegas 2015

Oh, there’s black jack and poker and the roulette wheel A fortune won and lost on every deal All you need’s a strong heart and a nerve of steel Viva LasVegas!

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or the first time in six years the High Rollers Scooter Rally in Las Vegas was once again a joint venture between US and UK organisers, which meant a large turnout of scooterists attending from all around the world.

We arrived in Vegas on Wednesday to find the rally hotel, The Downtown Grand, buzzing with early arrivals and the lobby bar already doing a great trade, packed with large groups of scooterists from the UK, US and even Australia.

People were spread out making use of the many bars or, in our case, took the opportunity to get a group of friends together and have a cocktail crawl around some of Vegas’ best known cocktail joints! Thursday was spent sightseeing and shopping before the

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rally officially started with either a rideout to the Vegas sign or a bar crawl with a twist – a poker run around five bars in the Downtown area. This was amazingly well supported with over 150 people bar crawling around the bars picking up a card in each one.

At the end the person with the best poker hand won $100 and free rally entry. The last card was pulled in the Beauty Bar, the venue of the Thursday night do. Here a mix of DJs from both sides of the Atlantic kept everyone dancing while the Suppressors kept the outside area jumping with their reggae/ska style.

Friday dawned and I headed to the hotel lobby where there were some very ill looking people wandering aimlessly around, looking for some kind of hangover cure. At 11am the rideout left for the Pioneer Saloon in Goodsprings around 40 miles from Vegas. The