On September 13th 1998 the British Motorcycle Club held its annual motorcycle show at D&D cycles in Pensacola, Florida. The 11th and 12th was solid rain as tropical storm Francis lashed the gulf coast. Sunday the 13th ,however, dawned clear and everything was a go for the show. We packed up our bikes and headed east on I-10 for Pensacola. Jim Arrington's Velocett was playing hard to start and took several hours of carburetor fiddling before it smoothed out and ran well. Jim Arrington’s bantam had been finished the week before and ran well. Jim Downey’s Bantam was hastily put together on Saturday and had yet to be road tested due to the liquid sunshine. It ran reasonably well when started at the show despite a few missing parts.
Here are some pictures from the show. I apologize for not getting everyone’s name. If you recognize a bike and can e mail the owner’s name to me I will add it to the web site. Lets start off with Jim Arrington’s 53 Velocette and Jim Downey’s 57 Triumph Thunderbird . The Velocette won second place in the British 1900-1960 class. The Thunderbird won 3rd. First place went to the 1951 BSA Bantam shown above. Mark Sawiki's immaculate Bantam also won best of show. Mark is from Talahassee and won last year with an equally impressive Triumph 30.5 "bathtub". Click here to see a close up of the Bantam’s engine.
Jim Arrington’s 1965 Bantam won 3rd place in the 1960- 1990 British category. Dink, the owner of D&D cycle’s, won 1st place with a 650 BSA (sorry no picture). I can’t remember the 2nd place. There was a real clean Trident which won the triple category. Check out the Kawasaki triple in the backround. For the European class David Paryzek entered his Harley Sprint . Like all of Dave’s bikes the sprint is perfection. Unfortunately, the crowd had seen it in years past so it did not win best of show although it has won that honor before. Dave also entered a Suzuki 500cc two-stoke twin and his green 125 stinger. All in concourse condition and received trophies but sorry no picture. There was a fantastic 1975 Norton Commando which took the ridden daily class. Finally, Lanny Greenburg came all the way from Jackson Mississippi with his custom "oil-in the frame" Triumph 650 which was beautiful and won the custom class easily. In the "parking lot" class was Carlos Forte’s BMW sidecar rig . His son Alex (pictured with the bike) braved the sidehack for the 60 mile journey. Carlos said he kept up with the 70 MPH traffic on I-10 but admitted he had to use full throttle on the hills. He went home on the back roads. The weather was Hot Hot Hot and with lots of sunburn and trophies we headed back to Mobile tired but happy.
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