Rain. Lots of rain. At night. Soaked through, 50-odd miles from my destination and on a lonely road in the middle of bleak West Country moorland. My headlamp was pointing anywhere but at the road, mainly because it was off another bike and had been hastily lashed between the yokes with bungees, because three hours earlier the Harley-Davidson Sportster I was riding had vibrated its own bulb to pieces just as I’d left home. As road trips go, this was bad and I was proper fed up.

Then came the electric shocks...

That was over 20 years ago, but my first decent ride on a Harley-Davidson is still painfully fresh in my memory. It coloured the way I thought about all Harleys for more than a decade. OK, so I loved the look of some of the old models, and I still reckon that one of the most handsome engines ever made is a Knucklehead, like a motor turned inside out, all tubes and bosses and chunks of sculpted alloy. And of course having seen On Any Sunday I, like millions of others, couldn’t help being struck by the brutal beauty of a bucking, sliding XR750 flat tracker (below) in the hands of the majestic Mert Lawwill. But XR750s, even today, are rare beasts in Britain.

As for the stuff I rode though the ’90s – and I rode most of the then current models – well, it was like climbing onto a fairground ride in a provincial town. Waltzer-gaudy behemoths that shook the money from your pockets and wouldn’t stop when you felt sick and wanted to get off. Massive heavy things, under-powered and under-braked that made the dodgems feel like finely honed sports cars. Harley fans told me I didn’t get it. No I didn’t, and I didn’t want to either.

Then in 2002 something extraordinary happened. The Harley From Mars landed on Earth. The VRSCA V-Rod (above) dropped among us like a spaceship. Here was proof that the blokes in Milwaukee had not only heard of liquid cooling, overhead camshafts and effective braking, but had engineered it into one of their bikes. The V-Rod managed to mix contemporary with custom with tradition with performance. And it does perform. I took an early one out for a blast in 2001 and when I gave it a fistful and felt 115bhp through my low-slung backside I laughed out loud, tickled to be so surprised.

Then 2008 finally brought something that echoed Mert Lawwill’s XR750. In the XR1200 (above), Milwaukee has given us a Harley suited to roads with those pesky things called bends. The styling reflects the dirt oval’s most successful race bike and has helped to boost an already growing interest in all things flat track. It’s a bike that combines the rorty chug of the old-style air-cooled pushrod V- twin with a feel that’s sportier than any street Harley before it.

Oh Mr Davidson, you’re spoiling us.

So do I get Harleys now? Well, I suppose I do, but then there’s more to get these days. But also, and you might call this age, I do find something comforting about, in the case of almost the whole Harley-Davidson range, a relatively basic motorcycle shamelessly showcasing proven old technology. Living history, you might call it. But then so is Bruce Forsyth, though I know what I’d rather be riding.

The post Harley Davidson Soars appeared first on Influx Magazine.

Andy Jenkins draws bikes and cars nicely. But the other four wheeled vehicles he is interested in are skateboards. He was, after all the Art Director and founder member of Girl Skateboards.

Andy also digs the print medium, his self-published zine Bend having been a lead player in the cult of the underground print publication.

We caught up with Andy recently when these lovely little illustrations went on sale for a snip.

Skate versus Bikes/Cars: what's the relationship?
Here in Los Angeles, it's simple. If you skate, you drive/ride. There's no other way to get around unless you're bumming rides.

What do you ride/drive?
I drive a hybrid... the powers that be here have all the nice cars. I used to commute on a Triumph Thruxton for a few years until I sold it to a coworker.

LA or San Francisco?
San Pedro! Get on the 110 freeway and head south from LA.

Dirtbike or Roadbike?
I love motocross and raced it for a few years. So I have an inclination towards dirt. BUT, I loved my Thruxton as well.

Print or Digi?
Both. Print if it's good, i.e. well designed and written. I tend to be a little more lenient about design if it's online.

The post The Art of Andy Jenkins… appeared first on Influx Magazine.

In a piece of quintessential 1980s expansionism, Bertone, kings of angular audacity, decided to hit up the American market with the Ramarro concept (that's 'Green Lizard' to you and I).

The Ramarro was based on a bog-standard 83 Corvette - and was we thing a misguided reach out to an American market hooked on the traditional values of cubic inches and heavy steel construction.

Would the yanquis ever have gone ahead with anything like this fusion of Italian futurism with the straightforwardness of Detroit brutalism?

We doubt it.

Still, the Ramarro was an interesting exercise. The cabin was swathed in an acreage of glass - and the wedgy, louvred design was reminiscent of the Alfa Carabo and other Bertone design studies. The interior featured lizard-like green leather upholstery and switchgear replaced gear shifters - a touch that in a sense foreshadowed Ferrari's manettino system.

The Ramarro was unveiled in LA just ahead of the 1984 Olympic games - and though the design won many plaudits in the automotive press - stimulated no doubt by the surge of internationalism that accompanied the games - no manufacturers were inspired enough to hire Bertone's designers.

Shame.

Film below features a period-correct soundtrack by Jean-Michel Jarre.

The post Concept Corner appeared first on Influx Magazine.

He was the father of Landscape photography - an artist whose musicianship almost matched his artistry with the camera. He is one of the founding fathers of a fundamentally American view of the world; But Ansel Adams also loved his cars.

And there's no contradiction nestling at the heart of this. Like many of us who love the hills, the rivers and the oceans: the aristocratic San Franciscan artist needed a sturdy vehicle to commune with his muse.

Adams spent decades exploring the great outdoors of America. He hiking, explored and documented the beauty of places like Yosemite and Yellowstone; from the soaring walls of El Capitan to the burbling miasma of Old Faithful - but as well as getting out there and getting amongst it, the gentle, bearded totem who created a whole art form used a series of usually large, often spectacular vehicles as platforms to steady his weighty equipment.

From cavernous De Soto limousines to hokey Ford Woodies and latterly Chevy wagons that would now be called SUVs- he always used the sturdy steel of Detroit-wrought Americana to create his art.

A beautifully produced little film (below) details his inspiration, kit and caboodle...

Click here to view the embedded video.

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This morning we've been thinking about a phenomenon that's been trawling its way through every aspect of our culture of late.

It's all about authenticity.

In the boomtimes we're always simply worried about the new: the cutting edge, the innovative, the next big thing. Bubble economies are inflated by this endless chase for the next way to turn around a pound note. It takes harder times and shrinking economies to wake us up to the enduring fact that the hand-wrought, the bespoke: the authentic are the things that really move your soul.

When all's said and done, something that is abstracted from trends and flashes-in-the-pan; things that are rooted in things like hard-work, classic aesthetics and tradition - these are the things that bring you through the bad times.

The film below, that focuses on Liberty Vintage Motorcycles is a classic example of a focus on something that aches within us.

Now where did I put that adjustable spanner?

Click here to view the embedded video.

The post Authenticity appeared first on Influx Magazine.

In your dreams you saw a glimpse of something interesting through a dusty warehouse window...you prised open the rotten old doorway..and there were 51. Yes 51 911s gathering the detritus of time and age.

Faston Hanks may be a literary creation - a fictional Automotive sleuth dreamt up in the fertile imagination of writer photographer Kevin Gosselin - but ye gads is this not the most unbelievable phenomenon?

If legend is actually true and this is not in reality some kind of grand and pointless hoax, this stash of Stuttgart steel was found in, of all places, deepest Wyoming

It may be stating the obvious that the vehicle of choice in said Western State is the Mack truck and the Mule - rather than the iconic german coupé. We've been staring at this story all day long and we still can't work out how all these motors ended up here.

Answers on a postcard please!

Photos and full story by Kevin Gosselin
via A Time To Get

The post Faston Hanks and the Ultimate Barn Find appeared first on Influx Magazine.

American photographer William Eggleston was the first artist who used colour photography to be accepted as a 'serious' artist by the Art Establishment.

His coolly abstracted lens was taken up wholeheartedly by film makers like Gus Van Sant , Wim Wenders and others who seek to evoke something uniquely American about America.

He made it possible for images of every day life wrought in colour to be exmined as art - lifted from pop culture to something more considered.

And, in Eggleston's frames, cars are often the most fully documented characters - the people often captured in profile, fleetingly and obliquely.

It's as if he understands how powerful the image of the car is in the American identity. Cars are, for Eggleston, easier to understand, less shifting and less ethereal than Americans themselves.

We've always felt instinctively that cars are much more than simply tools and should be considered with that in mind. Looking at Eggleston's work we're convinced they represent something much more powerful than we ever thought.

Images Via http://www.egglestontrust.com/

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Jacob is in his early twenties and runs Roy’s service station in Amboy, population 8: ‘the ghost town that ain’t dead yet’. Amiable, plump and a little stupid, Jacob is exactly the kind of lonely gas-pumper who gets blown away by the villain in the opening scenes of a Coen brothers movie. Like many of the other ghost towns that litter the floor of California’s Mojave desert, Amboy stands on the old Route 66 and was founded to feed and shelter the millions of migrants who headed west along John Steinbeck’s Mother Road to escape drought and famine in the thirties. But when Route 66 was bypassed by the interstates, the traffic dried up and the towns died. Amboy might not be dead yet, but it’s not looking too healthy.

So little disturbs Jacob’s days. And as a result, Jacob, we suspect, probably spends a little too much time sitting in the fierce Mojave sun. He’s impressed by the 155mph top speed of our Rolls-Royce Ghost, but certain his ancient, battered, dusty Mitsubishi is faster. “The guy I bought it from spent forty thousand dollars on the engine. It will do 287mph. He told me. I’ll never be caught speeding because that’s exactly 2mph faster than a cop car. A detective told me that.”

So what, exactly, are we doing in a £200,000 Rolls-Royce Ghost in a ghost town like Amboy? There’s more to this road trip than puns or irony. We wanted to explore California’s untidy back yard. Famously, were it independent, California would be the eighth richest nation on earth. But most of the wealth is on the coast; cross the San Bernadino mountains to the Mojave and it just gets weird. Weird landscape, like the Joshua Tree national park with its bizarre, twisted flora. Weird geology, like the inland Salton Sea, formed just a century ago and one of the hottest, least hospitable places on earth. Weird places names, like Zzyzx, Grimm, Mecca and Bagdad. And weird people: the very wealthy twenty minute’s drive from the dirt-poor; Mission Indians hosting poker on their reservations, and sun-crazed loners who honestly think their shitbox Mitsubishi will do nearly 300mph. But if that makes it sound crowded, it ain’t: it’s big and bleak and empty and slightly scary. It’s the California few know, and few get to see.

We also wanted to reconnect with a Rolls-Royce as a car, and as a piece of engineering, not a luxury good. Rolls no longer claims that famous old ‘best car in the world’ tag, but it ought to display some of the qualities that earned it that reputation a century ago; ought to take you deep into that desert at furious speed and in sybaritic luxury and without once making you worry that the nearest help is five miles overhead and just starting its descent towards LAX.

At 5.4 metres the Ghost still a colossal car; it even spills out of some plus-sized American parking spaces but it disguises its bulk beautifully and manages to look prestigious but not arrogant, exactly the pose Rolls needs it to strike in more austere times. You slide inside; it’s so well made, and from such extraordinary materials – leather that’s almost oily to the touch, fat lumps of aluminium, frosted glass and Steinway-grade black lacquer – that £195,840 before ‘personalization’ starts to feel like good value.

Rolls-Royce has somehow managed to make its monstrous 563bhp, twin-turbocharged, 6.6-litre V12 as refined as a Tesla at cruising speeds. And of course, the low-speed ride is magnificent. So we sigh from light to light as we set out from Palm Springs. Soon shops like ‘Diamonds of Splendor’ give way to Ray’s Towing and Frank’s Auto Body, and then to fields of dates being picked by long rows of sweltering migrant workers, and then just flat scrub as we head south to the Salton Sea.

What a dump. If it wasn’t for places like this balancing out the absurd wealth of Palm Springs, California would be way higher on that rich list. Early, optimistic attempts to market it as the Californian Riviera were scuppered by the intense heat, the water’s heavy saltiness and the stink caused by pollution and resulting mass die-offs of the fish. The sea is ringed with abandoned beach-front buildings and its few remaining settlements look more like the slums of Mexico City. This ain’t the OC. Many of the homes have an ancient Airstream caravan at their centre, to which various ramshackle lean-tos have been added: it’s as if those dustbowl migrants driving to the coast just gave up and stopped.

From here, the plan is to drive due north, over the Cottonwood Mountains into the Joshua Tree national park, through Twentynine Palms and north again across the Mojave to hit Route 66 and the ghost towns. Twentynine Palms is another weird place. Its 15,000 residents - lots of hippies, lots of artists – co-exist uneasily with the 10,000 marines who occupy and regularly blow up a patch of desert the size of LA directly to the north of the town. There are only three kinds of business around the base; ‘massage parlours’, tattoo artists, and barbers providing the haircuts the grunts are required to have once a week.

The road out to the north is deserted, because it doesn’t lead anywhere normal people would want to go. It skirts the back of the marine base, climbs over the Sheep Hole mountains, then drops down towards the vast, flat valley floor and runs, mostly laser-straight, to meet what’s left of what the world’s most famous road. It is beautiful, but arid and bleak and terrifying at the same time.

But for us it’s road-trip-perfect. I finally get that power-reserve gauge to show that the Ghost’s motor has nothing left to give. It’s very fast, the Ghost. It settles naturally at 130mph; enough for California’s famously unimaginative state troopers to put us in a cell for the night, but necessary if we’re going to race and overhaul the mile and half-long freight trains that rumble alongside the road. Their drivers blow their horns in appreciation as we run alongside them before we drop a couple of cogs and surge off towards the vanishing point.

The ghost towns, when you reach them, can be easy to miss. The ironically named Bagdad is shown on the Ghost’s very modern sat-nav but literally nothing remains, other than a faint track that leads away into the desert. In Chambless, a glorious but faded fifties sign for the Roadrunner’s Retreat and Restaurant still stands, along with a boarded-up diner and a gas station whose pumps have long-since toppled over, the numerals on their rotating counters melted into Daliesque distortions. The tarmac parking lot has been all but reclaimed by the desert, but like Ellis Island in New York, it’s impossible not to feel the presence of the millions of poor but hopeful who passed through here. It was maybe the greatest motoring migration in history.

We head back to Jacob’s for a cold Coke and a fill-up; run out of gas out here and you might end up ghostly yourself, for any of a number of reasons. Jacob still won’t let us take his picture; he claims to be one-eighth Native American and worries about the effect on his soul. But he is delighted we came back, and even happier that the same, slightly out-of-place German cabaret singer and model duo who’d attached themselves to us the night before in Twentynine Palms had stopped at his gas station and flirted with him too. “Three hot chicks a week, but I get two in one day!” Big country. Small place.

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In the process of research for our forthcoming seventies edition, we came across what is definitely my favourite piece of American muscle.

The 1970 'Hemi 'Cuda' was the top of the range sports version of Plymouth's workhouse the Barracuda, and was powered, naturally by the Chrysler version of the V8 Hemi (below).

Whilst most American muscle cars come across as brutal and one dimensional, there's something about the 'Cuda's lines that look almost graceful in an (almost) European kind of way.

See the footage of a beautiful black version of the notchback two-door below to see how much grace the car posesses. We think you'll agree it glides along the yank highway with uncommon poise.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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About this time of year, with the back-to-back bank holidays and the blossom hanging heavy on the boughs, even the most committed drivers among us begin to think of the beauty of sports utility.

Despite the partly justified bad press that the four wheel drive behemoths known as SUVs have received of late, there remains a strong argument for their use. Especially if that use is actually for that which they were designed.

Just look at this mutant wagon (above). Woodied up and loaded down with all the add-ons known to man. It’s undoubtedly stylish and even cool in an ironic kind of way. Aerodynamics, we think, may have been affected by the lifeboat tackle and the BBQ extension. Pure King of the Hill.

And look, then, at one of our favourite pieces of beautifully boxy utility from American company International Harvester. IH was one of those companies that was founded in the protean energy of turn of the century America, and remains one of the venerated founding fathers of the American motor trade. The gorgeous little Scout (above) was their mainstay and has been credited with sparking the original SUV revolution. When kept pristine and preserved in its original state, the simplicity and no nonsense fun of the car shines through.

Even more brawny, rare and desireable is, though, IH’s Travelall. If you can find one this side of the pond it’ll be a miracle. But, what better than a Travelall to tick of your neighbour and the teeth-sucking environmentalists than to load this baby up and take it camping for the weekend. Just better make it a local campsite, lest the fuel bill cost as much as a flight to the Carribean.

But if you needed convincing that these domesticated agriculturals are worthy of note, just take a couple of minutes to look at the video from one of the original US dealers. We would certainly buy a car from this man.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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