Oily-rag Excelsior: a well-used and unrestored gem

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One of the great pleasures of attending a vintage motorcycle event is the number of machines one sees which have been kept highly original, or which just look plain well-used. Such vehicles exist in the car world, of course, but motorcycle enthusiasts certainly seem less prone to the evils of over-restoration.

Of all the unrestored machines participating in the 2024 Pioneer Run, one of the most characterful-looking was Chris Cook's 1,000cc, inlet-over-exhaust, two-speed 1913 Excelsior. With such displacement, it was probably also one of the fastest things on the road to Shoreham. Characterful it may be, but sadly also shrouded in mystery; Chris knows nothing of its history prior to his purchasing it at the Stafford Autojumble in 2016, when he had just turned 30. It carried an age-related 'BF' number plate which had been issued in 2015, so either it had just been imported, presumably from America, or else it had been off the road for a very long time and lost its historic registration records. At Stafford, it was on a stand selling assorted bike parts and the vendor knew nothing about it.

Chris is something of an unusual case in as much as he has surrounded himself with veteran and vintage machinery without ever having had the guidance or encouragement from an enthusiast family. "I've just always liked old stuff. I've always had old bikes, old cars and a couple of steam engines, but no one else in my family is mechanically-minded. I did my first Pioneer Run 10 years ago, when I borrowed a friend's bike, a 1912 Pivot. After that I was hooked. I broke down half a dozen times—the magneto was terrible, the fuel was terrible, and the belt snapped—but I got there. Now I've got eight veteran bikes and a tricycle for the Veteran Car Run."

For somebody entering the hobby from a non-enthusiast family, his attitude was exactly the right one: "On the Veteran Car Run one year, I had a support van with a welder in it and a welded a valve on the trike at the side of the road. I can't fail—I'll do whatever it takes to get there."

Why Chris bought the Excelsior is a question which doesn't really need to be asked: "It was just the way it looked. A lot of our bikes are original. When you paint them, it's like you're hiding their history."

If the bike looked like it hadn't been used for a long time, the engine confirmed it. "The engine was completely knackered, and it had odd-sized pistons. We do machining ourselves but I wanted it to be perfect, so I got NP Veteran Engineering to do the engine for me. I want to keep the rest as original as I can."

So far, Nigel Parrott's work and Chris's careful maintenance have paid off. Now that it's got five or six Pioneer Runs behind it, Chris says, "Touch wood, it's got a 100 per cent. success rate so far." With that, Chris and I parted, but that wasn't the end of Chris's riding. Why bother with a trailer when the bike goes so well? He proceeded then to ride it home, an easy jog of some 25 miles.

Incidentally, by the time this appears, Chris will have done another Veteran Car Run, but he didn't use the tricycle in 2024. Instead, he took the controls of a 1901 Peugeot 2hp quadricycle which had never entered the run before. We'll be interested to see what he adds to his collection in the future...

We are now only a few weeks away from the first Veteran & Vintage Motorcycle Day at Brooklands on April 6th, where visitors can expect to see more than 300 pre-war motorcycles on display and in action, spanning the Pioneer, vintage and post-vintage eras.

Words and photographs: Zack Stiling
 

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