RIDING A 1927 FRANCIS-BARNETT
Pitching a tiny, 90-year-old Francis-barnett into the big, bad world of a modern city centre should be a recipe for disaster, surely? Well, there’s only one way to find out...
We hurl a time-warp ’20s tiddler into the cut and thrust of modern life – and find it’s surprisingly able
Bigger, taller, heavier. Today’s traffic gets worse by the day, with more and more cars crawling in a rolling queue. And these vehicles are larger than ever. Just as our society of excess craves phones, tellies and houses that are ridiculously ginormous, so cars have swollen into impracticality. I get the safety thing, but surely fashionable SUVS need not be so bloated. I saw a 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Ville the other day, perhaps the most flamboyantly-penned and oversized American car ever produced – it was dwarfed between some sort of blobby Mazda and a vast thing claiming to be a Mini.
I’ve been doing the same commute for 15 years, and the change in traffic conditions in just a decade-and-a-half has been bewildering. So just imagine what it’s like compared with 90 years ago...
My home-made time machine is waiting for a new warpthrust generator, so I unfortunately can’t pop back and sample pre-war times. The next best thing is definitely possible, however, as I can toss this time-warp 1927 Francis-barnett deep into the bustle of a modern city.
There’s a lot about this Lightweight that’s at odds with the direction motorcycle development took during the last century. It’s got a throttle lever on the handlebar, rather than a twistgrip. Limited suspension is provided by a curly leaf spring at the front, damped by a large rubber bung, and gears are selected by hand, using a long-travel lever on the right-hand side of the fuel tank. None of these features has as much initial impact as the size of the thing, however. The Francis-barnett is tiny – think low-riding child’s pushbike with a 147cc Villiers two-stroke and mountain-bike wheels – and it feels like I’m below the eyeline of the drivers in surrounding cars.