When your bike is worth three times your truck.

…and I enjoy them both.

 

I saw red in the preview and assume a superleggera ducati. What bike is that? I see a Vtwin engine? No chain on it?

 

chain is on the right side, there is another sprocket for if you decided to run a side car you can just rotate the wheel and put on a different chain.

it’s a 1950 Vincent Rapide in Chinese red

 

Interesting. So it has a drum brake in the rear then? Because I don't think sprockets make for particularly good disc brakes, haha

 

Bike is worth $75K?

 

correct, front and rear drums. Needless to say by today’s standards braking is… sketchy.

It has aftermarket twin leading shoe brakes up front that help tremendously, but still hairy.

 

Roughly, Vincent’s in general are very pricey. The only made 125 ever in Chinese red.

 

Get it off the trailer and rice it.

 

It’s no trailer queen, I am moving 1700 miles away.. well and need to pull the transmission.

 

Cool story.

 

this bike is 15 years before disc brakes were introduced to motorcycles. Some people do conversions but the vast majority keep them stock appearing.

 

Lol, all good. I figured as much. Just pumped to get away from winter and have a garage to work on this thing. Downtown Chicago was not great for motorcycles believe it or not.

 

Can we still say "Chinese red?"

 

All other bikes were black… wait till you hear the name of that color

 

Black Shadow?

 

This is the Rapide model, the shadow is king but this is a rare version of Rapide. They only made roughly 120 of them in red from the factory.

 

A friend of mine has a 1 of 3 bikes made. Only 2 exist today. His daily ride is a 1942 Indian.

He posted this a couple years ago. His shop looks like a motorcycle museum.




His Matchless.

 

Well then, just bad ass!

 

Beautiful bike!