Welcome to the Bristol Show Guide

Can you remember where you were 39 years ago? I’m guessing quite a few of you reading this may not have even landed on planet Earth back then.

But for those of us of a slightly, shall we say, more mature age can you remember what you were riding 1980? I can quite clearly; any of the latest models in the showroom at Freddie Frith motorcycles in Grimsby I could get my hands on. Oh the joy of being a motorcycle salesman!

Things in the world of motorcycling had really started to change back then; we couldn’t get enough Honda Super Dreams in to meet the high level of demand, and we couldn’t shift the dying embers of the British motorcycle industry that still languished in the showroom.

How well I remember the lonely, brand new, Triumph Bonneville sitting in the back corner of the showroom with the chrome dropping off the exhausts even before it had been started. And with a posh BMW franchise demanding more room in the parts department, what on earth were we going to do with all the obsolete Velocette spares? I daren’t tell you what happened to many of them!

And yet at that very moment people with foresight planned to launch classic motorcycle shows and autojumbles, and The Bristol Classic MotorCycle Show, along with Alan Whitehead’s Belle Vue show were born.

Lots of things have changed in those 39 years, but thankfully many have stayed the same, and this weekend we get to admire loving restorations carried out on motorcycles I abused back in 1980. Who would have thought it?

Enjoy the show.