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.

Sometimes it’s good to have your preconceptions challenged. I was brought up and into car culture through the entertaining and sometimes scurrilous Custom Car magazine of the 1970s (below).

Anyone that remembers that wickedly funny ‘zine will remember that as well as marrying cool modded motors with half-naked ladies Custom Car’s editorial was shot through with unadorned hatred of the Triumph Spitfire.

For some reason, the Spitfire seemed to represent to the editorial staff all that pretentious, gutless and twee about motoring in the 1970s.

And being an impressionable pre-teen in those days heady with the reek of Brut 33 and Long Life and John Player Specials, I carried this unjust hatred of the Spitfire with me deep into adulthood.

But recently we stumbled across a little set of pictures of a Spitfrire on the excellent Asphalt Heritage blog, and we’re looking at the Spitfire afresh.

We’re digging the low-slung lines. We’re admiring the purposeful stance and the peaky rear end. We’re thinking that the Spitfire must have been a fun and accessible way into motoring with a bit of passion.

This might come as a shock, but we Brits do not have a ‘special relationship’ with the United States. Anyone involved in motorcycling during the Fifties and Sixties, however, might have thought otherwise. Sure, British bikes flooded into North America as fast as the factories could ship them – but his was not the virile thrusting of manufacturing in its potent prime, it was the final spasms of the British motorcycle industry’s dying manhood.

All-American marketing knowhow played to the exotic in the heart of the Brit Empire

By the mid-Fifties, with Indian motorcycles recently dead and buried, Americans had one viable choice of home-built bike – the Harley-Davidson, which even in its sportier forms was, frankly, a fat plodder. The post-war US fashion for bobbing motorcycles (which entails ripping off tinware and bracketry and chopping short the heavy mudguards) helped to some degree. Bobbing was after all the birth of the custom scene as we know it. But sporting riders after light, quick, fine-handling machinery looked to Britain.

Well actually, they didn’t. Whether they knew it or not, they were looking to the major US importers such as TriCor, Johnson Motors and Berliner. Ran by switched-on blokes with bikes in their blood, these firms knew what the vast American market wanted and used their considerable leverage to squeeze changes and new models from England’s staid factories.

High-piped off-road exotica such as the Triumph TR6C and T120TT, Norton’s steroid-guzzling P11 or BSA’s Spitfire and Catalina scramblers poured across the Atlantic along with lithe and hopped-up road burners.

In 1965 alone, TriCor and Johnson Motors brought around 15,000 Triumphs into the States and the Meriden factory was working full-tilt to turn out about 700 bikes a week, almost 600 of which were exported, mostly to North America.

So, the Sixties progressed and America’s racers took British iron to huge success in desert races, dirt track, scrambles and road racing, while blissed-out loafer-shod glitterati cruised the boulevards of New York, LA and San Francisco on Bonnevilles, Lightnings and Commandos.

Meanwhile, back home in Brum, sallow-faced youths raised on boiled cabbage and drizzle were hunched over the elusive bike porn of US sales brochures, wondering why they were saddled with more conservative UK models that lacked the vital glint of California sunshine.

And why were they? Because the British industry was being run with the panache of a drunken monkey riding a neurotic ostrich.

Yes, there were great development engineers, not least Doug Hele (above) and Bert Hopwood who worked on some of the best Norton and Triumph/BSA bikes of the late sixties — but management had become bloated with so-called experts from outside the industry, with heads full of bile-inducing managerial nonsense.

On the other side of the boardroom table sat the Old Guard, who still believed that British was best and that those funny Japanese could jolly well have the small bike market, because they simply couldn’t build big bikes. Well, small capacity they may have been, but the States were importing ten times more Japanese bikes than British, laying down a solid customer base and dealer network. To say that the success of Honda’s advanced, slick and desirable CB750 Four of 1968 came as a surprise would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetically tragic.

Americans by now thought of Triumph, BSA and Norton as their own so casual xenophobia held back the inevitable for a certain amount of time. But it couldn’t last. As pressure from the competition grew quality control slipped. Loyal US importers were forced to spend increasing amounts of time correcting faults on British bikes fresh from the shipping crates just to make them fit for sale. Shameful.

The Brits simply hadn’t seen it coming. To say they were complacent is like saying the Ku Klux Klan is mildly provocative. Some would call it criminally negligent to sit on laurels first won in the 1930s.

At its height of British dominance of the Motorcycle industry more than 12,000 people worked at BSA’s main Small Heath factory in Birmingham. It covered 250 acres and housed the biggest motorcycle manufacturer in the world. It takes talent to wreck a business like that.

But by 1973 it was all over, the factory levelled soon after. Triumph meanwhile struggled on at Meriden, but a debilitating sickness of mismanagement, ownership changes and union unrest finally killed it in 1983. We should be thankful that the man who bought the Triumph name and manufacturing rights, John Bloor, has gone on to create a sound company that turns out world-class bikes from a state-of-the-art factory. And this is a man who is very switched on to the American market.

Cars started rolling just about the same time that movie cameras did. More than a century on, the movies are still in love with smell of burnt rubber. Every bit as much as their human occupants, bikes and cars are the stars of some of the greatest films ever made.

Wheel and reels collided with giant cultural impact in the ‘50s – Marlon Brando and James Dean both owe a portion of their iconic immortality to a bike and a car. Based on the infamous Hollister motorcycle-rally riot in 1947, The Wild One put a leather-clad Brando on a Triumph Thunderbird 6T as the leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club – and a new symbol of masculine cool was born.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But to talk about cars and bikes in the movies is really to talk about one man. Appearing in rear-view mirror of a sinister-black Dodge Charger, Steve McQueen wrapped his hands round the wheel a Ford Mustang Fastback and tore up the streets of San Francisco in ‘60s cop thriller Bullitt.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

McQueen loved wheels so much he even starred in Le Mans, a movie with that swapped script and story for stunning cars and incredible driving sequences.

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Only one other big-screen hero owes cars as much as McQueen: Her Majesty’s finest, Commander James Bond. Pimped out with ejector seat, machine guns and tyre-shredder, the Aston Martin DB5 became an essential 007 iconic in Goldfinger.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

No question, the ‘60s were a golden age for cars and bikes in Hollywood and Britain. Despite cruelly crushing a Lamborghini Muira with an earth-mover in the opening scene, The Italian Job made Mini Coopers an unmistakable part of the first version of Cool Britannia. Then runaway bride Marianne Faithful slipped naked into a leather jumpsuit for Girl On A Motorcycle, a psychedelic cult classic about, well, you know.

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But while Brando’s The Wild One got the motor running, the chopper really became a big-screen icon when Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper made Easy Rider. Powered by a Steppenwolf soundtrack the film became a counter-culture classic that changed Hollywood and made the choppers legendary. Ironically, the bikes were former police bikes – one was burned on film, the others were stolen.

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It sparked a cavalcade of shonky biker flicks and a few interesting ones, including Electra Glide In Blue, in which hippie cop Robert Blake rides a Harley Electra Glide.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Back on four wheels, the ‘70s taste for cool running continues with Two-Lane Blacktop, which saw musicians James Taylor and Dennis Wilson ( ‘55 Chevy) stirring the box alongside Warren Oates (‘70 Pontiac GTO) in motors that empower them to escape from The Man.

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Weirdly, though, it was love bug not a speed machine that captured the hearts of ‘70s cinema-goers. Disney’s Herbie franchise saw a little white VW Beetle become one of the popular characters it’s ever created.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As a new generation of teenage kicks began in the ‘80s, motors continued to be a yardstick of cool. Ferris Bueller did it all for his dad’s replica 1961 Ferrari 250 GT Spider California (“It is his love, it is his passion… it is his fault he didn’t lock the garage”). Back To The Future turned the gull-winged 1981 DeLorean DMC-12 into a time-travelling mean machine.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As if to strap into empty driver’s seat left by McQueen, Tom Cruise treated a Kawasaki GPz900R like an F-14 with wheels in 1986’a Top Gun.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another famous Hollywood biker is Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger, who chased Sarah Connor on a Honda 750 in Terminator, before upgrading to a Harley Davidson Fatboy in the sequel and uttering the immortal line: “I need your clothes, boots and your motorcycle.”

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Over the past few years of movies, bikes have been at the heart of some of cinema’s most inspiring true stories, including The Motorcycle Diaries (Che Guevara travels across South America on a a 500cc single cylinder Norton Motorcycle named La Poderosa, ‘The Mighty One’) and The World’s Fastest Indian (Anthony Hopkins stars as Kiwi speed-bike racer Burt Munro, who set an under-1000cc world record on a modified an Indian-brand motorcycle).

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The Fast And The Furious reignited a taste for modified cars and street racing, spawned three sequels (and counting), but when it comes to real car-nage – even after the souped-up battle rigs in Mad Max Road Warrior or Jason Statham’s Death Race remake – you still can’t beat Gone in 60 Seconds.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Check out the pulchritudinous slice of Anglo Italian cooperation that is the Triumph Italia. As you will read via MR Wiki, this car was actually (sort of) the TR3. Only 329 of this piece of beautiful automotive sculpture were built before, in 1961, Leyland bought out Triumph and the project was shelved forever.

It was penned by the great Michelotti and built by legendary coach builder Vignale in Torino. If only someone had had the vision to carry on with the Italia. We never really like the TR4 that replaced it…

Out of all of Michelotti’s Italianate creations that were blessed with English blood, the Italia is our Fave.

1964: Boyhood dreams of Grease, rock & denim.

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

Now, call us old fashioned, but could it be that the Triumph TR7 was the ugliest automotive creation of these islands? It’s not a particularly rare point of view – legend has it that when the Harris Mann penned design was first shown at the British leyland design meeting way back in the depths of three-day-week, recession wracked Britain of the early 1970s, it was thought to be a spoof. His other design had been, of course, The truly pug-ugly Austin Princess.

The potential for the car was great. Billed as ‘the shape of things to come’ at the time, the angular wedge was driven by a more or less the same two litre engine that appeared in the much loved Leyland stalwart the Dolomite Sprint. What’s more an iconic wedge-haired Joanna Lumley drove one in popular seventies action series The New Avengers (notice the synergy of ‘wedge’). Whatever you think of the design now, the TR7’s rakish modernism must have looked refreshing on the stolid streets of seventies Britain. It sold pretty well in the UK, and was a sales phenomenon in the US.

History, though, hasn’t been kind to its looks.

But in fact, we think you’ll agree that from the perspective of this angle achieved for an ad campaign, that the (Michelotti designed) convertible version actually looked kind of attractive from the raised three quarter.

Or could it be that the true genius of the campaign in question is the placement of the lingerie-clad lady on its wing?

BMW HP2 Megamoto

Why? One of the first signs that BMW had loosened its tie and started drinking in the morning. Powered by a highly tuned version of the fuel-injected, 1170cc, 8-valve Boxer engine, it is the most playful BMW ever built. Well, I say playful, playful like sporting a lamb chop waistcoat and having a game of ‘Hide and Seek’ with a grizzly bear.

+ It is a BMW the Batman would ride

– Short tank range. Loves expensive petrol

Suzuki GSX1100EFE

Why? It’s a dumb as a rock-chewing dog but it’s unlikely there’s been a sturdier motorcycle ever built. JCB could paint one yellow and use it in quarries. The engine is predecessor of the mighty GSX-R1100, but this bike has no fussy fairing to complicate or beautify. Cormac McCarthy’s Road will be patrolled by GSX1100s.

+ Simple, brutal and tougher than a herring gull

– Most have been turned into hideous drag bikes

Bimota SB2

Why? From the days when a tiny Italian firm, more used to making industrial heating and ventilation ducts, created the most advanced road bike the world had ever seen. Motive power is supplied by a tuned Suzuki GS750 motor. It’s also Massimo ‘916’ Tamburini’s first masterpiece.

+ The frame unbolts and splits in two for engine removal.

– Only 140 were ever built

Triumph Speed Triple T309

Why? The very first Hinckley Triumphs didn’t set the blood pumping. Reliable. Bulletproof. British. Yes, yes, yes, but a bit briar pipe for a 20-year-old. Until 1994’s Speed Triple T309. It’s a high watermark in motorcycle minimalism. Subsequent Speed Triples have all been technically better but didn’t capture the imagination in the same way.

+ Built to last. And British.

– It’s a pensioner magnet. ‘I used to ‘ave a Triumph…’

Penton 125 Six Day

Why? There’s something about these early-1970s dirt bikes that is just so right. The metal tank, yellow number boards, tiny drum brake and radial-fin heads. Of course, I could’ve chosen a Husqvarna 400, but this tiddler is close to perfect. These early bikes were produced by KTM for American company set up by enduro rider John Penton.

+ Weighs the same as loaf of bread, but climbs like an ibex

– A modern washing machine has more torque

Honda ST70 Dax

Why? Yes, its cousin, the C90, is the best-seller of all-time, but the Dax has fold-up bars so you can easily more store it on your yacht. What do you mean you haven’t got a yacht? You’ve got a Dax though, right?

+ Named Dax due to its similarity to the dachshund

– Doesn’t come with a free yacht.

Suzuki GSX-R1000 K5

Why? Every now and then the Japanese build a bike that so stunning lorry drivers stop owners and demand to lick their headlights. But, due to their relentless new product timescales the Japanese forced on the market, replace it in two years, and chuck away what made it so gorgeous. Yamaha did it with the R1 of ’02, and Suzuki did just the same in 2005.

+ The ultimate disposable Japanese hyperbike

- Blue and white can clash with your leathers

Scott TT Replica

Why? Between-the-wars, two-stroke racer for the road. The earlier Flying Squirrel is more famous, but the TT is the one I’d have. Long-stroke engine, fishtail exhausts and sturdy Scott front forks. And it’s liquid-cooled. The Japanese didn’t get to grips with that until the 1970s.

+ Pokey, even 70 years later

- Not named after a gliding rodent

Wood Yamaha YZ450

Why? A pure competition bike made in small numbers in Costa Mesa, California. This chro-mo framed beauty is built to compete in dirt track races on the short ovals of the Mid-West. It is as pared-down as an HB pencil. Everything fit perfectly, and has a purpose. It is the purest distilled essence of a racing motorcycle on the planet.

+ Absolute minimalism

- Not much good for touring the Alps

Indian Scout

Why? Like the majority of, but not all, the bikes in the list it was built to last. They left the factory a few years after The Great War and some, still 90% original, are still earning their keep on the various Walls of Death around the world. The other reason I love them is for their left-hand throttle, swapped to allow Patrolman to ride and shoot at the same time.

+ The tooled-up vigilante’s ideal ride.

- Unless the bad guys are in anything faster than an Austin 7

The blogosphere is awash with paens to Steve McQueen as an icon of cool. Why is Steve McQueen such an important figurehead for (mostly) blokes who like cars and motorbikes. It can’t be just about how good he looked, can it?

His was a hard life. You’ve probably heard all about it before. The absent father. The Alcoholic mother.  He suffered struggles in education and run-ins with violent street gangs. He spent his youth hanging out with a coterie of whores, oilmen, lumberjacks and circus performers before landing himself a gig in the Korean-war era US Marine Corps. In a prescient echo of his performance in The Great Escape, he spent time in the brig for going AWOL, before stepping up to the plate and embracing the life of a military man and eventually distinguishing himself.

The 20 year old McQueen was honourably discharged from the  Marine Corps in 1950 and straight away began to study acting in New York. At the weekends he would race motorbikes – and according to various sources he was so successful that he was able to live off the prize money to fund his drama training.

It wasn’t until 1957, however, that landed his big break playing a tough, taciturn bounty hunter in a network series called Wanted: Dead or Alive. He went on to make his name for  brilliantly studied performances – often playing marginal mavericks who managed to see to the heart of a situation – and, crucially – were able to act on that intuition to a certain blend of stylish triumph.

Throughout the sixties McQueen came to exemplify the complex and contradictory vision of manhood than many men share: one where the dark and the light co-exist and complement each other. An essence of the characters he played – from the steely PI in Bullitt to the American GT usurper in Le Mans and everything in between, shone through to his daily life.

“Racing is life. Everything else is just waiting…” When McQueen spoke those words in the trailer of Le Mans, you could tell the man really meant it, and similarly, when he was quoted by a journalist as saying “I live for myself, I don’t answer to anyone” there was a self-evident truth in the utterence.

From today’s perspective, such uncompromising candor coming from a major Hollywood star is hard to envisage.

Taking this reality to heart, it’s hardly surprising that the fashion industry has taken great note of the outfits he casually wore and have sold his image back to us time and again. Take a close look at these pics and ask yourself if you’ve never wanted to step into Steve McQueen’s shoes.

Anyone who has ever dreamt of the freedom glimpsed behind the wheel at speed can recognise the reality that lay beneath this apparently styled surface.

Images via Life Archive & Luther Blissett