I must apologise to all of you who’ve been following BSM since it’s inception. I know you’ve seen both these machines in these pages before, but I just had to – for my own selfish reasons – ride them and strike them off my Must Ride list. Besides, you didn’t see them both together now, did ya? Anyway, allow me to go on. I promised Bijoy (myself actually) that I’d somehow make this shoot happen and many telephone calls and humble requests and postponed dates later,I finally ended up meeting Reuben Solomon. And how!The man rolled in astride the Venom with his friend Atul on the Goldstar. It was a crisp Pune morning and the cantonment area was deserted. The thundering machines broke the morning silence and before the thump clatter vroom, thump clatter vroom deafened our ears, the duo killed the engines and rolled to a halt. Solomon greeted me with a cleverly crafted and totally unprintable one-liner that is probably his standard greeting to people my age. His Venom and Goldstar said a kind hello with a sparkle in their eye, er chrome.
Both the Goldie and the Venom are in their own leagues, but the reason you find them together in these pages is because both these machines have literally re-written record books in their time. They are both children of the ton-up culture. Goldstars in their various forms were some of the most successful of all road racing machines. Whether it was the scrambles, trials, road racing or the coveted Isle of Man Senior TT cup, the Goldstar has taken more than its fair share of trophies. The Velocette was there at all the events too, but what’s really special for the Venom is that this March, it will be celebrating it’s 47th year of setting the 24-hour speed record for a 500cc motorcycle at 100.05 mph (161.01 kph, average speed). And mind you, the record remains unbeaten today.The BSA Goldstar is a DBD34, the ultimate form of the Goldstar. By 1956, the Goldie had been through the M24, ZB34, BB34 and the CB series, so by now it had been through various states of tune. At 42 bhp, sporting a double cradle frame, alloy head and block, clip-ons (this one had Maguras), ventilated drum brakes and a humongous Amal GP, it was at the zenith of its existence. It couldn’t get better than this, or so I thought.
Enter the Velocette Venom. This Venom, from 1958, is one of the earlier models. But the Venom, after it was introduced for Velocette’s 1956 line-up, hardly went through any iterations mechanically. The motorcycle is special, it is right before my eyes but it appears to be unreal. And it was built to be way ahead of its time. The most significant change that the Venom ever went through was in 1958, when it was fitted with an exhaust valve made from Nimonic 10 – a superalloy. I feel rather stupid telling you all of this, so to put it into perspective or somewhere close, the Venom is like a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow and if you chance upon it in any form, take off your lid and bow, British motorcycles never got better than this. The Goldie on the other hand could be likened to the Austin Healey 3000 – it was every boy-racer’s dream.The Velocette, like Solomon himself, is one of the last surviving species in the country. Solomon has owned this Velocette – and the Goldstar – for over 30 years. He tells us that the Venom was used as a motocrosser before he bought it, and the Goldie was a bit better off. He painstakingly put both the motorcycles together after quite a few trips to Blighty to empty his pockets while stocking up on the missing bits. The Goldstar DBD34 is not very rare, but not many can be put beside this beautifully preserved specimen. This Venom is one of three in the country, and one of the other two is also a member of the Solomon family.
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