According to JNCB the Japanese government is bringing out a new Koreisha Mark– which is a badge that senior citizens are required to wear on their cars — to warn, presumably, the genral public of their elderly status. Apparently a lobby of Japanese senior citizens deemed the Autumnal-toned, teardrop shaped badge less than flattering.

It’s understandable that the elderly would not relish the prospect of being reminded of their impending mortality with a symbol that evokes the Autumn of their existence.

The image above contain the four final proposed symbols. Read what you will into the future designs – we think it’s still unacceptable to brand our most experienced drivers with a mark of Cain. What next: an obligatory pink fluffy Garfield for women drivers?

NYC based lensmen Cicero deGuzman JR knows how to train a lens on a motorbike.

We recieved word from Cicero this morning, informing us that the 3rd dispatch from his grease-caked world has been published.

Unfortunately we couldn’t make it out to join him to celebrate the release of Godspeed 3

Check out the books, hunt them down, by one online. You won’t be disapointed if you like cool motorcycles.

In my dreams I was a British Biker. I was a mod-baiting, leather wearing fetishist of all things American. That was the look anyway. But it was only English Iron that would do for my ride. Clip on bars. Pegs way back. Buffed steel tank. In my mind I nicked a featherbed frame from a greaser mate and bolted the Bonneville engine and I was away. Brilliant. The new roads of boom time Britain had me burning from caff-to-caff, round the gyratory and back again. Ton up to the bass string notes of Eddie Cochrane. That was the life in Levis and leather. Transatlantic exchange meant everything to me. In my imagination at least.

1975: Fizzy — first flights of Freedom

Then I came to consciousness. Reality check. Kenny Roberts was the hero. Forget Sheene. You could squeeze so much power and speed and noise out of the Yamaha FSIE’s 50 ccs. So it seemed to me anyway. I had a Roberts replica complete with wasp-like yellow and black paintjob. The boom time was over and there were power cuts and the three-day working week. Our estate was seething and humming and buzzing with the sound of my mates and their fizzies and the smell of two stroke and the heavy riffs of Metal. The dole money was enough to keep her going. They’re cool again now — icons of sustainability, apparently. For us, they were icons of the future.

image: thanks to Shane@ FS1E.net

1985: RDLC Powerbands and driving bans
The miner’s strike was over before it started. And we had scored our first licence. We never cared about politics, anyway. We were more interested in powerbands. And Elsie had a serious powerband. She kicked in hard and it was all you did to keep her lit and in the straight line. Elsie was all about first shunts, broken bones and first loves. If you tried to ride her like a fizzy you were doomed. And we were doomed alright. There was a certain feeling to the Elsie on the roads above the moors, and we were convinced it was all about the liquid.

1990s Kawasaki Ninja 600: knee dragging in middle age
By the mid nineties, you’d fallen out of love and back into lust with two wheels. The Ninja was the thing that did it. Elsie had proven too hard to live with, too riotous to handle. You had to get a job and get into four wheels. You first saw them on the road in Southern France. Well-off French kids in toothpaste leather scraping their knees in the borderlands up in the Pyrenees. All of a sudden everyone was riding sports bikes and I was a flash of green, with that slightly camp pink type on the rear. I left the Yam kink way behind. And the speed. It was the first time I’d travelled significantly over the Ton, a guilty secret which had inspired us all in the first place, but when you did it on the M1 you felt the breath of the grim reaper too keenly down the back of your neck.

2010: Back to the Future
I am a British biker. I am a Prius-baiting, Belstaff wearing, fetishist of all things British. Now it’s the clothing as well as the bike. I’ve paid Triumph and they’ve given me a recreation of the bike I dreamt of and I am away. The roads may be clogged, but I can bypass all that on the weekend. I get up early on a summer Sunday and I am back to those dreams of my youth. But now they are real. I avoid the Ace Café and all that retro nonsense. There’s nothing retro and ‘fashion’ about English-bred speed. All I need to do is twist my grip and I leave the last forty years behind. And it feels good.

Image: Deus Ex Machina

Words: Barney Morgan

Brothers Sam and Ollie Young are not your typical petrol heads. In fact when they are rac-ing their Electric Beetle, there is no petrol in sight. ‘Blackcurrant 3’ is the result of 7 years hard workshop graft and now stands as the only electric car in European drag competition. Producing in excess of 680,000 watts of power (that’s 500 times more than a 13a plug), the car accelerates to over 100 mph during the quarter mile. Electrical motor engineers by trade, the project was a step away from the normal three phase, high torque, low RPM set ups they normally work with. Powered by 60 Led Acid Batteries, this type of car is certainly is one to watch for the future.

Johnny ‘the Jeweler’ Everitt is the golden boy of Drag Racing. A jeweler by trade, John first got hooked when his brother took him to watch an event in 1972. Having driven most types of dragster over the years from door-slammers to railers, John currently drives ‘the Alien’, which is a 8.7 second Altered. The short wheel based nature of altered means that john regularly takes a wild ride. Current National Champion, John goes racing for more than just the winning, after 38 years involved going racing means spending time with close family and friends — as well as scoring an addictive adrenalin hit.

For the last 15 years Colin Lazenby’s street legal, all steel 56 Chevrolet has not only run the quarter mile in record breaking times, but has also gone to the shops and back again. What drives Colin forward is the constantly evolving challenge of breaking the 7.70 barrier whilst still keeping the car street legal. This, combined with the social aspects of Drag Rac-ing keeps Colin inspired.

59 year old Pharmaceutical Commissioning Engineer Steve Johnson, from Southampton has been involved with drag racing since pretty much the beginning. Coming from a back-ground in Formula Ford, the challenge of innovating a new way to go quicker than every-one else drew him in and the exhilaration of going fast kept him involved for the best part of 40 years. During this time he has amassed in excess of 30 championships across nearly every class of Drag Racing. He is currently running Super Pro ET in the Might Mouse dragster, which will cover the quarter-mile in around 7 seconds in excess of 180 MPH.

12 years ago Daventry based Air Conditioning Engineer Kevin Chairman put nitrous on his street bike. That was the start with his obsession with extremely fast two wheeled ma-chines. But, after 12 years racing Kevin decided enough was enough and hung up his leathers for what he thought was the last time. Team White Race, however knocked on his door three days later, looking for someone to develop a tune for their funny bike. The beast is capable of passes in the high 6 second range and sets world records in the process. The challenge proved too enticing to ignore, and after the world’s shortest retirement, the Turbo Funny bike was rolled into Kevin’s workshop.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Did you spot the problem with Luther? The recent critically acclaimed, highly entertaining and refreshingly edgy British Cop series, staring Idris Elba of The Wire was devoid of motors. Or it might be more correct to say it was devoid of proper motors. Though we personally love its boxy lines, no hardman Met detective would be seen dead in a Volvo 240 Saloon, like the one the eponymous lead character was driving. Let alone in light blue.

And that’s our only crit. The London locations were wickedly wrought. The hard hitting scenarios and the knockabout language was reminiscent of the classics. The acting was superb and the tension throughout the series built to a clever and Byzantine conclusion. But where, oh where, were the car chases?

There’s a long and noble tradition of British cops driving like maniacs on telly. More often than not, the British brawn of both the villains and the boys in blue are haring around less than sensibly in a fine selection of hulking equipment from Leyland and Dagenham. It might be all post modern and forward thinking and carbon-imprint preserving for the BBC to run a largely screechless cop show, but we believe an opportunity was missed. And don’t even mention Gene Hunt in his Red Quattro. That was just wrong.

In the opening sequence to the Sweeney, our favourite wickedly stripped-down and un-PC seventies cop show, the Mk 1 Granada (which according to certain experts, is actually a Ford Consul GT 3 Litre V6), is chucked around riotously and forms a central character in itself. The MK 2 Jag is, of course, course typecast as the getaway car of choice. There was a rawness and a danger to the men’s relationship to their motors that is real, guv. Knowworimean?

Take a look at this killer car chase. No CGI there. Just an unsophisticated white-knuckle ride with drum brakes and four star. There’s even the strategically placed stack of cardboard boxes that we once thought only ever appeared in Starsky and Hutch.

On the other side of the cop-crim divide is the hilarious, disturbing and slightly camp British gangster movie Villain. The film starred a dangerously alcoholic Richard Burton, who did his best, though the haze of Smirnoff (two bottles a day on set, allegedly), to come up with a rendition of a Kray like psychotic armed robber. Note this clip’s brilliant exchange of Mk 2 Getaway car for Ugly but moodily magnificent Ford Zodiac MK4. And note also Burton’s character’s curious table manners, even at time of crisis.

But in the final clip, from a trailer of the historically inaccurate heist flick whose subject was the great Train Robbery, shows why car chases are so important in cops and robber shows. The simple fact is: bad, mad and dangerous guys drive madly, badly and dangerously. End of story. And that is also why Luther needed to drive a an M5 at speed through the Isle of Dogs.

Last night we at Influx towers decided to dig out our fave car flick. It’s been a while since we’ve seen it. Walter Hill’s dark car chase movie The Driver is a stone cold classic. In fact, not only is the driving the main feature in the movie, it actually is the movie.

The normally clean cut and all-American Ryan O“Neill plays an unlikely genius wheelman crim; and in this scene early on in the film, he demonstrates his dexterity, performing a horribly thrilling demolition job in the process.

What’s so great about this as a car movie is that, as opposed to the huge majority of the cheesy contemporary takes on car culture like ‘Fast and Furious’ etc, is that this is a film almost devoid of dialogue or clamouring score and relies solely on the cool, understated cinematography. That, an of course the mind numbingly brilliant driving.

Hunt it down.

Screen grabs. Social networking. Iphone apps. A world without walls was dreamt up by software marketing people to make you think that working everywhere, any time would be a benefit to your own sense of freedom and transcendence of the bread and butter drudge of making a living.

In reality, this ‘world without walls’ has enslaved so many of us to the computer screen, the SMS and the email account.

Respect then, to people like those at It’s Better In the Wind, who use the tech at their disposal to disseminate a message that when all’s said and done getting out there in the elements on the road, looking for adventure, accepting what ever in real visceral time, may come your way — that that is the way to transcend the dull realities of simply getting by.

Have a great weekend. Load up, and get out there.

Stars have always sought out or been assigned new ways of creating an image.

We noticed, in our extensive daily scour of the web, that time and time again, to stick a celebrity on a motorbike alters their image.

Seeing someone like Daniel Day Lewis, say, or Paul McCartney on a motorbike does something to our ideas of them. Jack Nicholson, sure. Suzi Quattro, or even Sid Vicious– these sorts of faces sit comfortably astride a two-wheeled stallion. We’ve seen them before and their image of Bike and Individual are almost interchangeable.

But Jagger and James Dean, Anthony Quinn and Jerry Lee Lewis? It’s as if the motorbike transforms them and you see them in a new, clearer light.

Photographer Tim Smyth has launched a joint exhibition with artist Guy Gormley called ‘Vehicles’ at Son Gallery in London’s less-than-fashionable peckham.

The exhibition runs until April 11 and explores the relationship between humans and cars through documentary and abstract photography.

The pair have taken inspiration from an excerpt from ‘Soft Machine’, an accompanying text by photographic editor Michael Grieve: “The French surrealist, George Bataille once remarked that ‘no collector could ever love a work of art as much as a fetishist loves a shoe’. Or a car for that matter. The car’s reality is open to projection.”

The exhibition concentrate on cars’ place in culture and its impact upon the broader human society.

Right up our strasse.

When I was a kid, I had a big picture book of cars. I was a bit obsessed with it.

Right in the centre spread of the book was a huge full bleed picture of a Porsche 911. Silver paintwork. Black alloys. Huge whale wing. It was probably a 1979 Turbo.

It looked lovely for sure. But more than the way it looked, the caption stuck in my tiny mind. “The Porsche 911 is the perfect choice of car for the transcontinental traveler”.

I had no idea what a transcontinental traveler was, of course. But I knew I wanted to be one.

And that’s the thing about Porsches. The gradual but ever-forward evolution of Ferdinand’s design is based on its supreme functionality. Yet rather than dull and stolid, function in this context is exotic, exciting.

That’s why despite their burgeoning popularity, you always look twice at a Porsche. Long will it continue. And they’ve also managed to back up the product with a beautifully-rendered graphic and commercial identity, as a quick glance through the things we’ve posted about Porsche will reveal.