THE VELOCETTE VICEROY
NOT SO MUCH A RULER
Perhaps this will please the one correspondent who said that he did not want to see motorbikes in a car magazine. His unarguable case was that they were not cars, and there were motorcycle magazines that cater for them.
However, as many classic car enthusiasts are just as fond of old bikes, we’re pushing boldy on — sort of. After all, this particular machine features sturdy bodywork — like a car — and, if he really doesn’t like motorcycles, our correspondent may be pleased to learn that this scooter virtually sank a motorcycle company.
The scooter in question is the Velocette Viceroy. As scooters go, it is as magnificent as its name, and an engineering tour de force. It features a front-mounted, horizontally opposed, twin-cylinder, boxer engine, which means that the piston throws are balanced and primary vibration is minimal. The 247cc air-cooled two-stroke is fuelled through an Amal carb and a sophisticated reed valve system. A bevel driveshaft takes power to the four-speed gearbox mounted just in front of the rear wheel, giving excellent weight distribution, and another shaft delivers power to the rear wheel. It has 12-inch wheels, a powerful starter motor, and 12V electrics — a rarity at the time it was built. Like its motorcycle brethren, it has telescopic forks and a rear swing arm.
Other scooters had weathershields that provided better weather protection than on motorcycles, but none could match the enveloping folds of the Viceroy.
What were they thinking?
In another relatively innovative move for the times, the general manager of the Velocette motorcycle company wrote to dealers saying that the all-new tooling for this machine was certainly a good investment, as the concept had been extensively tested with customers to make sure that this was what the market wanted. Was there lead in the water in Hall Green in those days? How else do we explain it? The bike was a spectacular failure.
Within four years, the scooter, Velocette’s last all-new model, was dead. By the end of the decade, the once-mighty Velocette motorcycle company — which set a 24-hour record average speed of more than 100mph (161kph) that stands to this day — had joined it.
How could it fail? The early ’60s were the height of the mod scooter craze in Britain, but the uber-cool mods wanted svelte Lambrettas and the slightly less stylish but more reliable Vespa. The Velocette’s sheer
bulk, its heavy-handed styling, the massively uncool Empire-era name — the ‘Viceroy’, for goodness’ sake — and maybe even its leatherclad biker heritage were firmly not on their shopping list.
The mods are out
So, the mods were out, but the cost of all this development also put off other potential customers. For the Viceroy’s asking price of around £200, you could easily buy a secondhand Anglia or save a bit more and get one of the new Minis for £500.
While Velocette was laboriously assembling two Viceroys a week, on the other side of the world, Honda was gearing up to produce Super Cubs, with their skimpy plastic leg shields, at the rate of 50,000 a month.
All told, fewer than 700 Viceroys were built, although a few more engines were made, some delivered to DMW Motorcycles for its Deemster scooters.
Velocette, with its glorious racing history, was no slouch at engines. The two-stroke twin produced 16hp (12kw) at 5000rpm and its good power-to-weight ratio let it live on for a while powering another potent symbol of the ’60s: hovercraft!
All of this makes the Viceroy a collectable and rideable machine.
Current owner John Meharry really appreciates all the features that Velocette was so sure would be a winning formula: the scooter’s reliability and quality, the ability to step through to get on the bike, its power, the comfortable ride, the weather protection, and the electric start.
“Throwing a leg over and kick-starting a Velocette — well, it’s not something to be taken lightly,” says John.
A motorcyclist’s scooter
“It’s massively over-engineered. It fires up easily, it handles well, and it really goes. It’s as big and solid as a motorcycle,” explains John. “It’s literally the scooter a motorcycle company would build.”
John knows of five Viceroys in
New Zealand, which has a strong Velocette presence overall.
The Viceroy will do over 100kph, and John has no trouble keeping up with 350cc motorcycles on Velocette club runs. He does, however, have to put up with occasional sledging from the club bikers, who call the machine a disgrace to the name of Velocette, and so on. When we acknowledged that the Viceroy was a left-field choice for our first motorcycle feature, as it wasn’t a real motorcycle, a ‘proper’ Velocette owner said that that was all right; it wasn’t a real scooter, either.