Banbury Run 2008
A vintagent’s ride in the country
January/February 2009
By Alan Cathcart
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Kyoichi Nakamura
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I’ve lived my entire motorcycling life within a stone’s throw of Banbury, nestled in the heart of rural England about 90 miles northwest of London. Yet until this year, I’d done so without ever attending one of the world’s largest feasts of two-wheeled nostalgia, the Banbury Run.
Held since 1949, the Banbury Run is claimed to be the world’s largest competitive event for Veteran (pre-World War I) and Vintage (post-World War II) motorcycles by its organizers, the 15,000-strong Vintage Motor Cycle Club (VMCC), which stages more than 1,000 old bike events each year up and down the British Isles. Not owning a period bike built before 1931, the cutoff date for eligible bikes, I had not only never ridden in “The Run,” I’d never even joined the crowds of onlookers lining the 60-mile course, watching an array of historic two-wheelers potter on by, providing the sights, sounds and smells of all our motorcycling yesterdays.
For this year’s 60th staging of the Banbury Run, I joined 599 other “vintagents” (vintage-motorcycle-mounted-gentlemen — get it?) for a ride in the country aboard a 500cc overhead-valve, pushrod Sunbeam Model 9. Belonging to Banbury Run organizer Dick Hodge and built in 1930, this was actually one of the most modern bikes taking part in the event, so at least I wouldn’t have to provide “light pedal assistance” as I grappled with climbing the daunting Sunrising Hill. I had the luxury of a 3-speed hand-change gearbox to do so, rather than a single-speed like some of the earliest devices. Ah, progress …
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Banbury beginnings
The first Banbury Run was held on June 26, 1949, three years after the founding of the VMCC. The ride started out as a run to Banbury from the outskirts of Birmingham, 40 miles away, but as that bombed-out city was rebuilt after WWII and expanded outward, traffic intensified and so the decision was taken to make it a run from Banbury into the surrounding countryside and back again. Banbury was chosen because it was a favorite base camp for factory testers from all the leading British motorcycle manufacturers based in the Midlands — which back then meant most of them, with BSA, Norton, Triumph, Velocette, Sunbeam, AJS, Royal Enfield and Ariel, to name only the best known, all located within a 20-mile radius of Birmingham. Each of them used Banbury as the gateway to the Cotswolds, whose picturesque hills provided good testing terrain.
Pressure on parking space led to a move out of Banbury for the 10th anniversary in 1958, to an old airfield at Honeybourne, where The Run both started and finished. It moved on to another airfield at Shennington in 1961, then back to the center of Banbury
in 1964.
The ever-increasing popularity of the event and the growing interest in old bikes prompted an ongoing search for a new, larger venue. But except for two years — the Golden Jubilee 50th running of The Run in 1998, and the 51st the following year — the event remained in Banbury.
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