Copyright CRMC 2011. CRMC is a limited company registered in England. Company Registration number 2102654.  webmaster@crmc.co.uk Most of them came from my own burgeoning collection to be ridden by my friends – machines like my CR93 Honda (yes, running a Japanese bike at a VMCC meeting was heady stuff back then!), 350 Aermacchi, ex-works F750 BSA-3, the ex-Pasolini XR750 Harley, my Matchless G50 about which I’d just made my first ever racer test article in company with Rupert Murden’s 7R AJS for the fledgling Classic Bike magazine, and so on – bikes that I’d acquired simply because I liked and admired them, representing an era which the two-stroke revolution had recently turned the page on. That first Brands demo was pretty successful, and although there was a purist faction in the Vintage Club which reckoned the bikes were unsuitable to appear at their meetings because they were too new, we were invited back again in 1979, together with a band of Dutch riders with bikes of a similar era, as well as Vintage machines. This time, though the secretary of the meeting was a gentleman named Jack Walton, and it was evident that he was not a fan of our kind of bikes, and didn’t want us there. Maybe he had a thing about Hondas – but anyway, while I can’t remember the final straw which broke this camel’s back, I do remember being accused of ‘cheating’ because I’d brought along my 1962 Matchless G50 and tried to pretend it was a Vintage bike. I’d done nothing of the kind, of course - and anyway, how could you ‘cheat’ in a Parade?! Pausing only to note that there were several alleged pre-1955 Manx Nortons racing that day which looked exactly like the much later ones my G50 had dead-heated in birth with, I was told that I’d be reported to the committee for ungentlemanly conduct, with the recommendation that my VMCC membership should be terminated – as indeed happened. To which I remember as clear as yesterday uttering the fateful words – “Suits me – we’ll go and found our own Classic Motorcycle club for this kind of bike,” a statement that was met with ribald laughter and the comment, “Good luck – you won’t last a year”! Well, here we are just racking up 30 of them….. But – it’s one thing to say you’re going to do something as momentous as that, quite another thing to see it through, and here I was lucky on a number of counts. Firstly, my wife Stella chipped in to do the vast amount of paperwork and organization in making it all possible – even more onerous after the arrival of No.1 child in July 1981, but no less demanding when combined with her fulltime job, especially as I was away abroad a great deal through my work back then in the travel industry, during which she had to hold the fort. Page 2 0f 7 Motorcycle Club Classic Racing