1933 KTT Mark IV Velocette

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"When you are riding a bike with a rigid frame, you have to be constantly vigilant about road conditions. You never ride straight, rather, in a drunken line avoiding potholes and cracks. I’ve crashed this bike twice. The first time, I was going through an off-camber turn with potholes and gravel. I was also going kind of fast." — Paul d’Orleans, explaining a dent in his 1933 KTT Mark IV Velocette.

A contractor by trade, Paul d’Orleans is by avocation a 1930s English clubman racer. Dressed in period garb, he rides his prewar British iron faster than many folks ride their modern motorcycles. He can often be found on twisty roads in the countryside outside his West Coast home, riding one of his three favorites: a 1926 flat tank Norton, a late Twenties Sunbeam and this 1933 KTT Velocette, nicknamed "The Little Mule" because of its prowess off road.

The road less chosen

Paul started out on his chosen road quite young. His father was interested in old cars, and he remembers him saying, repeatedly, "They made them so much better in the old days." His two older brothers rode, and as a child Paul couldn’t wait to get his own bike. "I started riding the day I turned 15-1/2, the day it was legal for me to ride a motorcycle," Paul says. "I’ve been on a motorcycle ever since. My first bike was a Honda Express — it saw me through college."

Combining his father’s and brothers’ interests, Paul almost immediately became interested in classic motorcycles, first with café racers. After a short stint with a single-cylinder BMW, he located a Norton Atlas. "I loved the power and handling, but I blew up the engine twice in the space of a year," Paul says. Shortly afterward, he located his first Velocette.

"I found it sitting in the back of Munroe Motors, the British motorcycle dealership in San Francisco," Paul says. "Jim Munroe had bought a Velocette Venom from some guy from Louisiana, and it was a real swamp bike — crashed, not running and covered with mud. I got it going the same day and rode it back to Munroe’s. Jim was mad that he had let it go so cheap, and stayed mad for about five minutes."

One of the last Velocettes made was the sporty 500cc Thruxton. After Paul bought a green Thruxton, he noticed a change in his interests: "The deeper I got into old motorcycles, the more I became curious about even older motorcycles. I thought that prewar racing bikes would suit my riding style, and I was right."