WEIRD AND WONDERFUL

Suzuki SW-1.

magine the style of a 1960s Lambretta, the colour scheme of a 1980s bathroom suite and the soggy performance of a mini cruiser. Say hello to Suzuki’s gloriously unusual SW-1.

Today’s retro boom isn’t the first. Old school has always been cool in Japan, and in the early 1990s manufacturers were falling over each other to create bikes inspired by their machines of the ’70s and ’80s. So Suzuki decided to out-retro everyone with a bike unlike anything they’d ever actually made. Or have made since.

Based around the air-cooled single from the cruiser-style GN250, it was the work of Naoki Sakai; the man responsible for those little Nissan Figaro cars driven by the sort of people who have a Chihuahua in their handbag. It intentionally had classic scooter elements. Wheels were small (16-inch front, 15-inch rear), fuel went under the seat, final drive was by belt, and the enclosed bodywork had round ‘Frenched’ lamps. Practical too: the dummy tank let you stash goat-skin riding gloves, and integral panniers provided space for a pudding-basin lid and goggles.

IOr your bowler hat. Though the ‘SW-1’ name was supposed to be a nod to the initial’s of Sakai’s design house, Water Studios, it also happened to be the postcode for the part of London that includes Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament. And anything British was huge in Japan. Suzuki did all the promotional photography in London, with the bikes on UK plates and a suitable smattering of black cabs, red phone boxes and Routemasters in the background.

But maybe a 19bhp über-retro wasn’t quite what the market fancied. Just 200 were made in 1992, all for Japan (though it evolved into the TU250, a conventional naked still made). Different landscape these days, though. The market’s more diverse than ever, scooters no longer get snubbed (well, not as much) and the retro thing is bigger than ever before. A super-usable SW-1 could be just the job in... well, SW1. When they crop up in the UK prices can be stiff. As in £6000. But nobody knows what one is so they often sell for attractive money: H&H auctions flogged one recently for £2800. Cool and cheap.