Blimey, one day you're out riding your state-of-the-art repli-racer in jeans and a t-shirt, and the next you're smothered in Gore-tex and thermals gingerly piloting your aged scooter through the gloomy autumn snizzle (that's a cross between snow and drizzle, as if you care). Which of course also means that it's time for any self-respecting motorbicycle hack to haul out the platitudes and scribble about the NEC Bike Show, and the Dirt Rider Expo which follows it a few days later down the road at Stoneleigh Cattle Market.But for once in my life I'm going to defy the comforts of convention, if only to tell you that this year - or rather last, since you're probably reading this with a post New Year hangover - the high-point of the bike show season wasn't actually a bike show at all. And before the shouts of 'Nurse, the screens' ring down the wires from the Editor's Throne Room, I must explain that I'm talking about the auctioning off of the remaining assets of Norton Rotary Engineering. Also under the hammer was an esoteric collection of largely British bikes owned by the company's final proprietor, lottery winner Keith Moore, whose death earlier in 2003 prompted the sale. See, the combination of esoteric if not downright peculiar motorbicycles and the machinery, fixtures, fittings and ephemera from the last of Britain's old school bike manufacturers was worth several times the admission price to any brightly lit shed full of scantily-clad lovelies draped across much more modern ironware.
And let's just remind ourselves that although in it's last, almost two decade-long death throes the Norton marque was best known for a range of machines powered by the relatively advanced Wankel rotary-engine, it was still run like its forebears elsewhere in the Midlands. Which is not to say badly, but certainly with the insufficient funding that undermined R & D, production efficiencies and marketing clout.
Touring the tiny Shenstone factory before the auction began it was painfully obvious from the weary old machine tools and generally dog-eared nature of the whole set-up that this was light years away from the notions of bike manufacturing currently practiced abroad (and, of course, in Hinckley).
Ditto 160 brand new Yamaha wheels (the bikes used rather inadequate Yam suspension, remember), which were briskly bid up to £600, or £3.75 apiece, and which will have some autojumblers rubbing their oily mittens in delight. And for those in the souvenir business, a whole passel of genuine sweatshirts - mostly small (just the thing for the kiddies at Christmas, guv'nor) went for a modest £450 and even a bunch of badges and stickers fetched £85.
Not that there weren't a few moisty-eyed privateers sitting nervously amongst the hoary old tradesmen packed into (and outside) the tent that functioned as an auction room, and they were presumably happy to pay eighty quid for a bundle of Norton catalogues and £490 for the leathers worn by the last of Norton's racers, Ian Simpson, albeit at rather less than their estimated value of £600-800.
But the stars of the show were the race bikes that Keith Moore had hoped to restore to their extremely impressive glory at last year's TT. Sadly he died before it could happen and his executors - obviously lawyers to a man - kyboshed what would've been a nice epitaph to Mr Moore for fear the bikes would be devalued in the event of a shunt. But £37,000 for Jim Simpson's machine and £42,000 (why so much more ?) for the near identical one ridden by Jim Moodie, was big money indeed.
A rather motley collection of Commanders and Interplods fetched pretty much what they would in the classifieds, and mostly below their catalogue estimate. Just £1100 copped a high mileage police bike, although a well maintained 46,000 mile Commander reached £5500. Somewhat ironically, a badly soiled example of one of the few gawky looking and generally unloved rotary engined RE5s that Suzuki managed to sell between 1974 and '77 achieved £3900, i.e. more than most of the Nortons.
Actually, the other end of the scale at this particular sale wasn't a motorcycle, or even a bit of a bike, it was Lot 260, a whacking great German machine tool which realised a paltry £20 - almost the lowest price of the day and £580 below its catalogue estimate. Wandering around the factory beforehand, I doubt that many people would realise the significance of a Kopp Trochoid Grinder, but this was a rare machine, probably unique in the U.K., which carved out the combustion chambers for the rotary engines. Apparently they cost half-a-million pounds when commissioned to produce the original Wankel engines, although the canny Dennis Poore allegedly paid a tiny fraction of that - if anything at all when he bought the British design rights for the rotaries. And now it was going from scrap, a sorry end to the dream of keeping the rotorbike alive, and certainly the prospect of British built Norton motorcycles.
Not, of course, that the old dog is completely dead, for the catalogue tantalisingly featured Lot 185 as the sole 2003 Norton 880cc Commando in the UK. Built to order - which is pretty much what the rotaries were, too - by Vintage Rebuilds in Oregon, USA, who now own the marque, this handsome looking bike with its blue-printed engine would've been the star of my particular show.
But of course legal problems meant it was withdrawn, only serving to prove that when it comes to a motorcycle show, and like any cynical hack, I'm always disappointed.