Pete Roberts built this special in 1993 and named it Thunderdog. Underneath the radical styling is a Honda Gold Wing. Those solid looking wheels are the original ones with covers made out of a camper van roof. The silencers came from a Ford Capri, the headlamps from a Citreon 2CV, and the engine temperature gauge is an old Geiger counter, graduated in Mr/h; milliroentgens per hour!
The thousand year old village of Ludgershall near Quainton holds a bike night every year; it’s a charity event, collecting money for the village. I’m a biker, so naturally I went along.
Bikes are parked on the wide verge of the High Street. It all starts at six in the evening but I didn’t get there until seven so I had to park on the village green. That didn’t matter because there were plenty of interesting bikes there too.
Here are some of them.
Villagers sit out on the verges for the evening. The bikes are a Honda RCB1000 endurance bike and a Suzuki 1100 Katana, but I mis-identified the Honda when I saw it at Ludgershall in 2019.
Honda’s CB500T was only produced for two years, in 1975 and 1976; it's quite rare. It has a 500cc engine.
The Ariel Huntmaster, actually a badge engineered BSA A10, was launched in 1954 and produced until 1959. It’s a 650cc twin.
This band gave us background music, with a race bike tucked in beside them. It’s a Yamaha TZ250, and in 1975 racer Roger Cope rode it in the Manx Grand Prix, achieving the fastest lap and coming second overall.
The last bike I looked at that evening, a 1976 Suzuki GT380. Not often seen these days, the GT380 is a 2-stroke triple.
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