Copyright CRMC 2011. CRMC is a limited company registered in England. Company Registration number 2102654.  webmaster@crmc.co.uk The CRMC was founded by Alan Cathcart along with his wife Stella and the legendary tuner Dick Linton. Here Alan gives us some background about the foundation of the Classic Racing Motorcycle Club. It is a long article over 7 pages, but great reading and worth 10 minutes! The bike which was the catalyst for founding the CRMC was my original Matchless G50 that I rode again in the 30th year celebrations at Snetteron. When I bought it in 1974, it was just 12 years old, but while quite uncompetitive against the RG500 Suzukis, overbored TZ350 Yamahas and suchlike which would come to dominate National 500cc racing in the late 1970s, it was also too young for the Vintage Club, with their 25-year cutoff date.  Hence the only place to compete with the bike was in the Single-Cylinder races at Brands Hatch and Snetterton first run by Bemsee and the Newmarket Club, later by others, which were the last resort of an endangered British and Italian species. Spare parts were already quite a problem, though the G50/7R were better off than equivalent Manx Nortons thanks to Colin Seeley’s late-‘60s efforts. But I and others loved the bikes of what we called the Classic era – newer and more practical as well as faster than Vintage, but not as young as the diminishing number of then-current four-stroke mounts, and there were enough of us who still wanted to race our original 7R, G50 or Seeley/Métisse derivative, Petty Manx, Aermacchi, Ducati, or any other of the dozens of desirable denizens from all our recent yesterdays, to make up full grids providing gripping racing. Too bad if you owned a Linto, Paton or Triumph twin, though…. The Vintage Club had an annual Brands Hatch meeting which for some reason was lighter each year on entries than their meetings at other circuits, so in 1978 – as a VMCC member – together with Brands ace and later NGK plug rep Martyn Ashwood, I arranged with their Racing Section to lay on a couple of Parades at the Vintage Race of the South for what we now call Classic bikes. Page 1 of 7 Motorcycle Club Classic Racing