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Man Maths: Norton café racer
3 months ago
A caf racer would just about hit the magic ton
As long as you kick them like you mean it and the timing and points are set properly, then the twin exhausts of a caf racer will roar and whenever that happens, a crowd will surely gather…
Based on the Triumph, BSA or Norton twin-cylinder machines of the period, usually using Rex McCandless’s fine-handling Norton featherbed frame, these were the bare-bones rockets of their day.
And the caf racer is an invention of the teenager, throughout ages seen as disrespectful, lazy and feckless. As Shakespeare’s old shepherd puts it in The Winter’s Tale: ‘I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting…’
The 1950s and ’60s teenager was no different. They were fed up with adults telling them how they won the war, they just wanted to listen to rock-n-roll and hang out with like-minded souls, but unlike their American counterparts they didn’t have lots of money for cars, so bikes became the thing and cafs (or the more posh, cafés) were the meeting points.
Some years ago I interviewed Tex Childs, who was the 1960s night manager at the caf racers’ Mecca, the Ace Café on London’s North Circular.
‘It was a golden age,’ he told me, ‘although we didn’t know it at the time. There was no drink or drugs, just tobacco and speed, and all your spare money went into the fuel tank, or the jukebox. All the bikers wanted was somewhere to meet and talk, preferably with a big forecourt.’
The term caf racer was reputedly coined by scornful truck drivers, who said the teenagers weren’t proper racers, they were ‘caf racers’. And the name stuck for the stripped-down frames and bare aluminium fuel tanks of the machines, which eventually leaked back across the Atlantic to America where teenagers adopted the look (Brylcreem quiff, leather jackets, tall leather boots with fisherman’s socks over the top). Out of the Ace Café these tyro racers would tear up to the next roundabout, achieving the magic ton (100mph) on the way, take the roundabout gouging the foot pegs into the tarmac and race back to the Ace for nothing except a milky coffee and the adulation of their mates.
So it’s as much the image as the machines that lies behind the appeal. They’re not very fast, but so evocative. I once took my Norton to the Lake District with a group of friends. There, up on the high roads, far away from the tourist spots, I hung the old machine on the cable with the hammering exhausts chasing me along like hell’s banshees. For an entire morning, I was the man they couldn’t hang – what a buzz. I was still reeling as I sipped a pint outside The Old Crown at Hesket Newmarket with the Norton tinkling away as it cooled.
So they make you feel younger, they look terrific, they give you all manner of mechanical puzzles and heartache. What’s not to like? The Norton Atlas sold for £9600 in the end. I knew I should have put in a bid…
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