Classic camera

With the white stuff covering much of the UK recently, it seemed an apt time to use a wintry photograph.

The 1964 Victory Trial, with road racing star John Hartle, winner of the 1960 Junior TT, in action on a Velocette. An unusual choice of trials machine, and one soon to be well and truly out of vogue, being a traditional ‘big single,’ as, lurking on the horizon, the Bultaco-led ‘Spanish Armada’ was looming.

In his book ‘Velocette motorcycles – MSS to Thruxton’ Rod Burris writes of man and machine: “John Hartle… acquired the experimental scrambler next, having already quite a close link to Hall Green. A superb trials rider and engineer, John’s job was to develop a cheap production trials bike. He soon started to achieve success, even at national level. Unfortunately, an accident ruled him out for a whole season and then, sadly, a road racing crash claimed his life. After that, the project died.”

It seems fellow road racer Dan Shorey acquired the Velo, though it appears to have all been separated; the frame turned up in the Midlands, the engine in Australia, while the registration number XOB 525 was last known to be on another off-road styled MSS, resident in Japan.

Though Burris infers that Hartle’s death ended the Velo trials project, actually poor John was killed, aged 34, in 1968, by which time one would assume Velocette’s trials dalliance was well and truly ended.

The emergence of Greeves et al had pretty much done for the heavyweights, which were finished once and for all, when, in late 1964, Sammy Miller – probably the last heavyweight man standing – switched from his 500cc Ariel to a 250c lightweight two-stoke too, in the form of the Spanish Bultaco, and started winning everything in sight.