THE annual Castrol Day of the Champions at the Zwartkops Raceway in Pretoria drew a large crowd of nostalgic bikers last week.
But as always the annual event, now in its fifth year, was not only about vaseline-lensed memories of those long-gone days when we most of the riders could still use vaseline.
MD of Honda Southern Africa, Yoshiaki Nakamura, showed he could still drag his knee with the best of them in what many agreed was “a masterly display of riding” at Zwartkops.
Nakamura san was a GP rider for the Honda team in Japan during his racing career and he just screamed off in the last Legends of the TT race on his ex-factory Honda 250 cc two-stroke twin.
Among the old bikes, the star of the day was Boksnot, the legendary 250 cc Velocette racing special, built by the late Jannie Stander in the early fifties and raced by him until the early sixties. The hand-made bike also raced at Zwartkops at it’s inaugural meeting in November 1961.
Stander won the 250 cc SA Championship in 1958 and the late Tommy Johns then also raced to several podiums on Boksnot, only retiring the little bike in 1965, when it could no longer keep up with the new Japanese two strokes coming out of the corners.
Stander turned, welded and bolted this fantastic little bike almost entirely by hand, from the crude aluminium fuel tank and under- slung oil tank to the rocker box cover.
Boksnot still bears the marks of hack saws, metal files and hand drills and hammers that went into making the components that made this bike as quick as it was.
Another attention grabber was a Honda ridden by seven-time world champion Jim Redman.
Refinishing expert and publisher Ian Groat fielded this and six other classic machines that he restored over the past decade.
“They are mainly British classics — a Norton, a Matchless and a AJS, an Italian Ducati and this howling 250 cc four-cylinder Honda ridden by Redman,” said Groat.
