Looking like a cross between a mobility scooter, a Sinclair C5 and a JD Bug, the Honda Zook (otherwise known as the MS50L) looked like a deathtrap, and must have ridden like one.
Released in 1990, it came with a fold-up steering column and seat post, presumably for parking in tiny Japanese city spaces. It was, we assume, aimed at students and the very naïve, with the rather loathsome candy-coloured marketing campaign featuring the Japanese predecessor of that annoying bloke from the Halifax ads.
It had a two litre fuel tank and could apparently top 33 MPH with a prevailing wind. Not a patch on the earlier, ruggedly cool Motra. But interesting nonetheless. Not surprising it was a bit of a dead end, and if you can find one we suggest you burn it. From an aesthetic point of view it makes the eyes hurt.
In terms of iconic 1960s design Innocenti’s Lambrettas are on a par with the the E-Type Jaguar and BMC Mini (yes, I know it was first shown in 1959). In my mind, there isn’t another two-wheeler that sums up the decade’s design influences better.
Innocenti, based in the Lambrate district of Milan, crawled out of the smouldering wreckage in the bombed-out industrial north with a plan to put post-Mussolini Italy back on its feet by putting the nation’s workers on Lambretta’s eight-inch wheels.
Of course, fellow Italians Piaggio created the Vespa, and their wasp buzzed onto the roads in 1946, a year earlier than Lambretta’s model A was released. And the Vespa’s designer Carradino d’Asconio, whose aeroplane design business had been curtailed by being on the losing side in the war, should be regarded as a genius for establishing a template the company’s scooters still use now: full legshields; revolutionary monocoque frame; ‘bubble’ sidepanels; single-sided front fork.
The original Vespa was pretty, clever, a classic. In contrast the first Lambretta was utilitarian. And Piaggio went on to sell over 10 million scooters to Lambretta’s four million. But that’s all blah, blah, blah as far as I’m concerned, because in my mind Vepsas are for Roundheads with bad Madness tattoos and I’m a Lambretta loving Cavalier.
Piaggio are now one of the world’s heavyweights in two-wheeled production. They own Moto-Guzzi, Aprilia and Gilera. Innocenti, meanwhile, Lambretta’s manufacturer, stopped scooter production in 1972 (before going out of business completely in the 1990s). These contrasting facts elicit nothing but a shrug and a teenaged ‘So?’ from me. In virtually every area that can be turned into a pie chart and illustrated with an overhead projector Vespas trump Lambrettas. But Lambrettas are cool and beautiful. And better. End of.
It did take a while for the Milanese company to hone their design. Legshields and sidepanels didn’t appear till 1950 and can’t be described any more accurately than ‘slightly bulbous’ till the Slimstyle designs appeared in 1962. Throughout the 1960s the Slimstyle, first used on the Li Series 3, developed into the TV series 3 and, for me, the last word in scooter design, the SX200.
Why do I get so frothed-up about a somewhat effeminate commuter scooter? Let me explain.
The long, steel sidepanels have creases sharper than those in Dean Martin’s Rat Pack-era trousers. The pure jet-age panel indentation is augmented with a three-pronged flash in cast alloy. One of the prongs dissects a daintily cast number giving the engine’s cylinder capacity. The 150 has different, only slightly less beautiful panels with it’s own design of sidepanel flash. The rear of the SX200’s sidepanel has another delicate cast Lambretta badge, while the square-topped legshields have a further chromed script ‘Special’ and either X150 or X200 badge. There are details everywhere: heavy alloy panel handles; cable operated disc brakes (Lambretta were one of the first factories to fit them to production two– wheelers); the cast alloy horn cover with it’s lower-case ‘i’ for Innocenti.
I remember reading that the designer referred to the SX200 as ‘his beautiful swan’. See one from the side and you can understand why. The headlight and handlebars are the head, the sweep of the legshields a long neck, the panels are the wings folded over the bird’s body. And like the swan, the exterior is serene while underneath the simple 200cc two-stroke, four-speed single paddles away frantically.
Now I tend to like bikes that are stripped-back and minimal. I generally curl my lip at the over-designed. But the SX200 is fussy and covered in styling baubles and tinsel. You can’t deny your first love, though, and the SX200 is mine. I’ve owned one, the same one, for 19 years and I’ll never sell it.
Lambretta might have gone out of business but they went out with a bang. Car design genius Bertone was commissioned in 1969 to redesign the SX range and created the Grand Prix. The GP came in bold colours like a blood red, turquoise and a very 70s mustard ‘yellow ochre’. Bertone fought to ditch the polished alloy badging that makes the SX so recognisable and of its time. The Grand Prix’s badging is minimal. Instead of polished castings the sidepanels have plastic grilles and racey stick-on stripes. The horn grille is simplified and black.
In fact, all the grey rubbers and plastics that had been grey on Lambrettas since the early-50s, turned black. Some early 150cc Grand Prixs had a black ‘blob’ sticker on their legshields. The legendary story of how it came to be there states Bertone became so angry that the bosses at Innocenti wouldn’t let him replace the old-fashioned polished alloy with the new black he, and other leading designers, would usher in, he threw his pen on the desk and it landed on the drawings of the new scooter, spitting a glob of ink right onto the legshields on one of the plans.
Bertone won, but there are still dozens of labour intensive fittings, like the fiddly floorboard runners and rubber legshield edges, that can’t have helped production costs. But these are the kind of touches that make old scooters, bikes and cars so much more special than the aggressively built-to-a-price machines that followed.
We’re huge Honda fans here at Influx. We make no secret of it. We’ve owned a few Hondas between us over the years, and each vehicle — from monkey bike to Civic estate: has been at heart a passionately engineered, fun-to-own specimen of veh-hicklehood.
So when we stumbled across this promo shot of Honda’s bike range from the early eighties, we’d thought we’d share the colourful panoply from the Dream Factory. There was a colourful correctness to the bikes of the era that was bang on-message. Fun.
And while you’re there, check out the Japanese promo from the same period. We had no idea another set of early eighties superstars represented the brand with so much nuttiness. Madness.
–Lemmy of Motorhead famously referred to them as ‘hairdryers.’ To him and his ilk, they are whining little machines whose performance an attitude are a joke compared to the brawn and substance of the classic piece of English Iron.
Hundreds of thousands, across the generations, have disagreed. For them, the modernists among us, the scooter is an iconic mode of transportation that is both functional and stylish. It’s an enduring opinion. Last year, world wide scooter sales increased by an astonishing 41%. In contrast, motorbike sales declined by 7%.
It would seem that once again, the Mods have seen off the rockers.
The scooter is of course heavily associated with the Mods, that fashion obsessed 60s British youth cult that made this machine their official form of transportation. For the true Modernist, the scooter was perfect. Not only was it stylish and functional, it was foreign, sleek and colourful and it represented the future.
Moreover, its past was just as enticing as its present.
The scooter was born between the two World Wars. In 1919, Italian engineering companies turned their attention away from weapons of mass destruction and towards personal transportation. Within months they were producing early versions of the scooter. Over the years the Autoped became the Skootamota became the Unibus became the Autoglider became the Brockhouse Corgi. In 1947, the scooter arrived.
The man responsible for its classic design was an Italian named Corradino D’Ascanio. His boss, Enrico Piaggio, had surveyed the ruins of post war Italy and quickly realized that the population needed cheap transportation. His company already produced the MP 5 (nicknamed Paperino, the Italian name for Donald Duck because of its weird design,) but Piaggio had never been convinced of this bike’s qualities.
He challenged D’Ascanio to come up with a better product.
For his part, D’Ascanio hated the motorcycle. He thought them bulky and unsafe. Worse still the drive chain alone made for an extremely dirty riding experience. To eliminate these problems D’Ascanio put the gear lever on the handlebar, gave the vehicle a body that carried all the stress and created a seat which was far safer than that of the motorcycle.
When Piaggio saw D’Ascanio’s original designs, he exclaimed, ‘Sembra una vespa!’ — It looks like a wasp!
The machine had just been bestowed with a name which would become as famous as pasta. Such was the purity and strength of D’Ascanio’s original design, the shape and engineering principle of the Vespa has resisted change for nearly fifty years. Originally of 98cc capacity, it later evolved to 125, 150 and then 200 cc. Piaggio’s first run of the Vespa numbered just one hundred. Very soon, as demand outstripped supply, the company were able to leap into serious mass manufacturing.
Inevitably, they soon had a rival. In 1947, the Innocenti company of Milan unveiled the Lambretta scooter. Unlike the Vespa, the Lambretta was open framed and did not offer much protection against rogue weather elements. It didn’t seem to matter. By the early 1950s sales of both scooters had rocketed. Although other companies produced their own variations, Vespa and Lambretta led the way. Always have done, always will.
In England the first inkling that a revolution was taking place in Italy came through films such as Roman Holiday, starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn. This very famous scene depicted the two stars, merrily scootering around the Italian capital. Soon UK advertisers of everything from clothing brands to coffee began using the scooter in their posters and commercials as a symbol of fun and adventure.
Britain was, of course, undergoing massive changes of its own. After years of post-war gloom and austerity, the economy was now starting to heat up and a new liberal sensibility was taking hold, particularly among the younger generation. The global cult of the teenager was born.
Smack bang in the middle of these cultural shifts came the Modernists. Their name was soon abbreviated to ‘Mods;. Modernists were born just after the Second World War. To them Britain’s past was a land they had no intention of visiting. Instead, they demanded they own the future — and the exotic, stylish italian scooters would be an integral symbol of that future.
In keeping with their anti imperialist instincts, Modernists developed a outward-looking worldview that allowed them to look everywhere for inspiration. They listened American R&B and Post Bop Jazz. They watched Italian neo realist films as much for fashion tips as to get their groove on. And they of course spotted the scooter there too.
By the early 60s a huge demand for the Vespa had developed in the UK. Many Mods used the system of hire purchase to get hold of these expensive machines. In keeping with their desire to customise and make them their own, many Mods also added mirrors to their machines or painted on the names of favourite record labels, singers, bands, lovers, scooter clubs, etc.
But they didn’t just use their scooter to zip round town being fashionable – they also headed out of London to seaside resorts such as Margate or Brighton. Some of these jaunts ended in fights with rockers or the local motorbike gang. These incidents were totally overblown by the nationals but what this press coverage really achieved was to forever associate in many people’s minds the parka clad Mod with the scooter.
This obsession with image amongst the British mods lasted well into the eighties, inspired anew by Franc Roddam’s 1979 film Quadrophenia, (which was based on the album of the same name from iconic Mod band The Who). Quadrophenia inspired a second modernist boom among the youth of Britain and to this day there are pockets of Scooter loving mods all over Britain and the world.
In Italy, though, a different story was taking place. The emergence of the small Fiat and Mini cars began to challenge the scooter’s dominance. However, the Vespa could resist such developments thanks to the huge worldwide orders they had received from America, Japan and of course, Europe.
In 1960 Vespa sales passed the two million mark; in 1970 it reached four million, and by 1988 could boats that they had sold ten million machines. Today, that figure is 16 million units sold.
In the mid 90s, the Britpop musical phenomenon, fronted by bands such as Oasis, brought the scooter back into vogue once more. The day after their historic Knebworth concert Noël and Liam Gallagher were photographed driving round town on their GX scooters, overnight doubling their price. By this time Vespa and Lambretta had been busy redesigning their machines for the 21st century. Many of their designs although safer and more efficient, lacked the style and beauty of the original. There is now a trend towards placing modern day engine within classic scooter frames to achieve the optimum in scootering. One thing is for sure, the appeal of the scooter, much to Lemmy’s disgust, refuses to die.
If only we lived in a country were year-round utilisation of a vehicle like Piaggio’s Ape Calessino was possible. But, alas, you’d really have to be a Roman to get away with it. Britain’s roads, climate and attitude to style just doesn’t facilitate transport with such panache, darling.
Originally designed by aeronautical engineer Corradino d’Ascanio, the Ape’s star rose during the Italian economic boom of the 1950/1960s: the era that came to be known as La Dolce Vita.
The latest manifestation of the Ape Calessino is a strictly Limited Edition — Only 999 of these vehicles will be available in the world – for details of availability check the Piaggio website. Wonder if it comes with the white fluffy poodle as standard.
