Scooter scene, number 25, November 1988 - AF Rayspeed / CS Tyres replica

Owner: Christopher Brelsford, Skegness.
Make/Model: 1969 Lambretta GP200.
Engine: Stage Six 225 with Yamaha TZ piston and Harley-Davidson conrod conversion, reed valve mounted 34mm Amal carb, modified 48mm exhaust system, Li150 gearbox. All work completed by Mark Broadhurst at MB Developments, except exhaust - by owner.
Paint: 1988 AF Rayspeed race colourways by Maca at Down Town Custom, Leeds.
Miscellaneous: Hydraulic front disc conversion, AF electronic ignition kit, Bitubo rear shocker.
Some months ago (June 1988) we ran a back cover shot of a scooter belonging to Alan `Butch' Kay from Morecambe; you may remember it - a candy red and green GP Rather than the conventional blow-by-blow account, much of the accompanying text was given over to Alan's own comments, not all of which were relevant but were undeniably as interesting as they were controversial.
The strength of your response was measured by our `Letters' page -Butch getting involved at one point - and proved to us, not that we needed much convincing, that the people best qualified to write these articles are you, the owners.
It sounds great in theory, but in practice it isn't always practical or possible. Which is just as well since if it were then I would be forced to look for alternative employment. In this instance, though, I've looked through the four pages of notes I took from the owner, Chris, and what he had to say makes a damn sight more sense than anything I might be able to conjure up. I'm also left wondering whether this might have anything to do with the fact that like Alan Kay, Chris Brelsford is a bit more advanced in years than the average (?)owner of a custom scooter.
I suspect it is. Anyway, see what you think.
"I always wanted a scooter" Chris begins, "Right from when I was ten years old, which would have been about 1970. My older brother was an original member of the Sheffield Scorpions, which, as clubs go, wasn't exactly oversubscribed. in fact it only had five members, and, since there wasn't much of an alternative, I guess you would have called them mods; though this was at that tail end of the mod thing. Anyway, one weekend they came back from attending a grass track meeting at Cadwell Park (Cadwell was not tarmac'd until much later) and that was it. The lights and mirrors went in the bin. Not that there was much alternative. They didn't want to be mods anymore, nor were they scooterboys, and if you were a scooterboy then there was only one machine worth having - a Lambretta GP200.
Like I said, I was only a kid at the time but that didn't stop me from riding my brother's scooter up and down our street. I couldn't go far because the helmet used to fall down over my eyes, which made it difficult to see obstacles like lamp-posts and oncoming traffic."
"By the time I'd reached the required age everything had changed. My brother had sold his scooter and the club was gone. If you did see a scooter in Sheffield, a rare event then, it was usually being ridden by an old boy in a cork helmet and WW1 trenchcoat. Almost inevitably I got into bikes and owned some seriously powerful machines, including a Kawasaki Z1. Bigger and even better toys followed, the best of which was a race spec RS Escort that must have been one of the fastest Fords in Britain in its day. I know one thing - it cost me enough."
"Karting looked interesting so I had a go at that. Although fiercely competitive, I was soon able to achieve a standard that I was satisfied with. The pattern kept repeating itself. I became involved, set myself a target and once I'd surpassed that I'd rapidly lose interest"
Which brings us up to the present day. Chris went on "I still wanted that scooter and last Christmas I decided to do something about it. I bought a bike minus engine and the first thing I did was to find out if Arthur Francis was still in business. I found that they'd moved up to Scarborough, which was handy, and that Ray Kemp was now running things."
"I wanted it in plain paint, in keeping with the theme which was to have it looking and sounding like it was straight out of the early seventies, but when Ray showed me one of the new race bikes, I wanted mine the same."
As you may have already guessed, `wanting' and `having' are just two words leading to more or less the same end. So while Maca was slowly doing the business, he turned his attention to the engine. Or he would have done if he'd had one.
"1 had some very definite ideas about the engine. Not only had it to run right, it had to look and sound right too. Which is why I didn't want a TS1 kit with the carb on the `wrong' side, and definitely didn't want an upswept 'motorbike' exhaust. MB Developments was less than an hour away, so I went up to check them out and was impressed by what I saw. Mark puts a lot of time and effort into his work, but above all a lot of enthusiasm. He built the engine from scratch."
By now the panelwork was transformed, although it's worth mentioning that only the main frame survived to this stage; the rest had to be replaced with new before it was painted. Costly, but necessary. You might bear it in mind if you're considering something similar. Some, like Maca or john Spurgeon or Peter Merchant, won't work on metal that is irreversibly corroded or damaged, and which just might not be apparent until a good few layers of paint have been removed. Sometimes it's better to buy new.
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