Banana Republic

The great thing about being part of a magazine like CMM is that you’ve got all the experiences of bikes from ‘back in the day’ backed up with hindsight and history.

Then you saddle up a bike you did way back when and all these amazing ingredients serve up a balanced view of the bike that, with the benefits of 20-20 vintage vision, means you can properly sum up a bike in a way that you probably couldn’t back then.

Now, I’d best set my stall out and say how much I’m a big fan of early Hinckley Triumphs. I guess it’s because my first foray into motorcycle journalism came at a time when they were only a few years out of the starting gate and as I was way down the pecking order for bikes at the weekly paper where I worked, I often got the ‘off-cuts’. At first these were unloved bikes, the keys of which would lay dusty in the office key cupboard. My early