The last Sunday of every month, the Petersen Automotive Museum hosts a “Breakfast Club Cruise-In”. This past Sunday, the theme was “Cafe Racers”, so I decided to go check it out! There’s a few cars mixed in, and I might have spent too much time with a prototype for the rebirth of the Dan Gurney Alligator (which was impressively comfortable, even if I only sat in it for a moment), but here’s a few of my favorite photos, and there’s a link to the rest of the photos I took at the bottom.
Even though it’s not a cafe racer, I decided to bring the Honda S90 out for this. I was pleased to see it got some attention, mostly from people who had one as their first bike:
Unique sidecar rig:
Amusing license plate frame on a 2002:
Hollywood Electrics brought a couple of Zero’s and the Brammo Empluse R:
Custom Flying Brick:
Then I got to chat for a moment with Reese (I apologize if that’s not the correct spelling), a gentlemen who’s working to build the new Alligator. They actually brought out the first model (Dan Gurney’s personal ride) from the first production run of 36 bikes:
I didn’t know that all of them were carbon fiber but had been painted. Looking at this one, it makes you wonder why they didn’t just leave it as is. Beautiful.
This is one of the four prototypes for the new bike. It is powered by a S&S Twin that puts out something along the lines of 150hp/140tq, curing the only complaint people seemed to have about the original bike – not enough power. Unfortunately, this engine isn’t ideal for the Alligator’s needs, so the company will be building their own inline twin engines to ensure sufficient power but also keep the engine as narrow as possible to maximize lean angles.
Full electronic display for the new bike. There’s also a nifty switch that tones power down to 70% of maximum to let someone new to the bike (like a journalist) get used to it before they give you full power. May I someday get the chance…
To cap it off, two guys from Random Cycles showed up on small bikes, so my S90 looked like it belonged:
For the rest of the photos (fair warning – there aren’t many more), check out this Flickr album.
This month’s Cruise-In will be September 28th – maybe I’ll see you there!