Ugo Cirri’s unusual Matchless G3L
The spoils of war
May/June 2009
By James Adam Bolton
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Sara Zinelli
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Back in 1967, life for a 20-year-old Piaggio employee wasn’t half bad; regular work at the Pontedera factory producing brightly-colored Vespas gave a decent wage that could be frittered away on pretty women, dancing, lazing on nearby sunny Mediterranean beaches and motorcycles.
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“Happy days indeed,” sighs Ugo Cirri, a genial and typically warm Italian who resides in a small village not far from Pisa, and is the proud owner and restorer of this fine but unusual Matchless G3L. “We’d have improvised races on the way to work on our bikes, all small Italian stuff, but what we really desired were BSAs, Nortons, Triumphs — you know, proper motorcycles. We wanted Mini Coopers, The Beatles, James Bond, The Stones. It seemed everything cool came from the U.K. in 1967, especially if you lived in a small town in Italy.”
Just 20 years previously there couldn’t have been a greater contrast on the street in Italy. A war-torn infrastructure and shortages made life problematic, but there were a few consolations for the Italian people to help themselves get back to normality. The Germans, Brits and Yanks had all been in and out of Italy as invaders and liberators, and they had discarded or abandoned huge amounts of military hardware including tanks, trucks and motorcycles.
“The Italian authorities quickly organized theses vehicles into huge deposits called ARAR camps,” explains Ugo, “and the stuff was sold and auctioned off to make quick cash for the government, and provide cheap transport and raw materials for the people. My Matchless, which started life as a 1943 G3L British war department model, would have ended up on one of these heaps of metal after the war.”
And who’s to say that this Matchless didn’t land in Sicily in 1943, work its way up through fierce fighting in Italy to end up in Tuscany, only to be abandoned ungraciously after its war service, to then pass into appreciative Italian hands? Ugo has no doubts that it was singled out for special treatment after being rescued from the scrap heap, as the difference between his example and the standard rigid-framed G3L is all too glaringly obvious, in the form of the beautiful rear end that could only be “made in Italy.”
Suspension of disbelief
Like some mythical mechanical Centaur, the G3L has at some point in its past been transformed into half war-department-plodder, half exotic-Latin-lothario racer, using the best ends of both. The rear rigid section of the Matchless frame has been completely discarded, replaced with a suspension and swing arm that was designed and patented by Gilera in the 1930s, and appeared on many of its road bikes and racers like the Saturno. Horizontal springs, adjustable in length, run in boxes along the rear frame rails and friction knobs connected to the swing arm provide the damping. It’s an elegant and effective system, and it’s light years ahead of the rigid frame and sprung saddle setup that most manufacturers used well into the late 1940s. A half-moon rear mudguard that looks like it came off a Moto Guzzi Dondolino racer and a round, chromed rear light emphasize the “Italianization” of the rear half of the Matchless. But how and why did it end up on an abandoned military machine?
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