If you’re a motorcycle fan, you no doubt know all about the Guggenheim Museum’s “Art of the Motorcycle” exhibit.
You’ve wandered among the amazing bike displays at the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum in Birmingham, Ala., and may have ridden to Maggie Valley, N.C., to see historic American machines in Dale Walksler’s Wheels Through Time Museum.
But have you been to Solvang?
Solvang is a charming town about 50 miles north of Santa Barbara, in California’s Central Coast region.
Founded by immigrants from Denmark, it’s a kind of Danish Disneyland, with an Old World downtown and many fine restaurants, hotels and resorts. The surrounding Santa Ynez Valley is home to more than 60 wineries (the movie “Sideways” was filmed in the area).
But for cyclists, the attraction lies in the Solvang Village Square on Alisal Road.
The Vintage Motorcycle Museum, housed in a former Brooks Brothers clothing store, has an astounding collection of motorcycles from all eras and a wide array of countries, from Britain’s AJS to China’s Zingfu (surely a German Zundapp will complete the alphabet soon).
The collection totals about 100 motorcycles, with 60 or so on display at any one time. If size matters, it’s hardly a rival to the Barber Museum’s nearly 900 bikes. Still, what’s there is choice.
Beautiful, unusual and rare machines, many with racing backgrounds, fill the tastefully lighted space.
Just inside the door is a 1979 Suzuki RG500 road racer, its “square four” two-stroke engine exposed for inspection. A nearby corner features a working reproduction of Karl Benz’ 1903 gas-engine car, its three wheels qualifying it as an honorary motorcycle. Two bikes powered by Wankel engines (a 1988 Norton Rotary and a 1975 Suzuki RE5) are prominent–and described accurately as marketplace failures in excellent signs nearby.
Among U.S. manufacturers, you’d expect Harley-Davidson, but you’ll also see bikes from Buell, Henderson, Indian, Thor and Whizzer. England’s manufacturers are represented by such well-known brands as BSA and Triumph and by Brough, DOT, Excelsior, Matchless, Velocette and Vincent.
The stunning Italian collection includes a pair of gorgeous MV Agusta road racers and an early twin-cylinder Moto Guzzi as well as bikes from Benelli, Ducati and Gilera.
One of the museum’s most unusual bikes is a Villa 4-cylinder, two-stroke 250-cc racer built by former world champion Walter Villa. It’s another “square four,” with two horizontal cylinders below and two above.
A bike fan might expect a collection to contain a Czechoslovakian Jawa, but this museum has three–a spidery ’70s-era speedway bike, all wheels and engine; a truly unusual 1960 road racer, its rear wheel shrouded in an attempt at streamlining; and a CZ 125-cc road racer with an enveloping “dustbin” fairing. Manufacturers from Germany, Japan and Belgium (a 1910 FN 4-cylinder machine) also are represented.
And there’s a nod to the dominant cultural presence in Solvang: A 1936 Danish Nimbus 4-cylinder model with a matching sidecar.
Perhaps the highlight of the collection, at least until other acquisitions move it from the spotlight, is its Britten V1000 road racer, an innovative V-twin made by the late New Zealand designer/builder John Britten and his crew. Only 10 of these machines were made. This is the tenth.
The Vintage Motorcycle Museum was created five years ago by Dr. Virgil Elings, an MIT-trained physicist who developed the first graduate program in scientific instrumentation at the University of California at Santa Barbara. While on sabbatical in 1987, he co-founded Digital Instruments, which developed scanning microscopes that can “see” individual atoms. He left UCSB and ran the company for what his Web site (www.motosolvang.com) calls “10 extremely successful years,” then merged it with Veeco Instruments in 1998 and retired, devoting much of his time to charitable activities.
He bought the former Solvang Designer Outlet Center as a business opportunity, and, almost as an afterthought, created the museum to house the expanding collection of motorcycles he had been gathering for more than 20 years.
When he was growing up in Iowa, Elings explained, a kid with a motorcycle could get a learner’s permit at 14, and he didn’t need to ride with an adult, as he would if he were driving a car.
His first bike was a 1939 James, a British machine powered by a Villiers two-stroke engine. A few years later, he stepped up to a BSA Golden Flash, a 650-cc twin he rode to California and back, exhibiting a faith in mid-20th Century British motorcycle engineering that not everyone shares. He moved away from motorcycles while working toward his PhD, but once he took the professorship in Santa Barbara, he jumped back in, buying a 500-cc BSA.
“Things deteriorated from there,” he said with a laugh.
Over the years, he and one of his two sons have been involved in motocross and vintage road racing, most often in events sanctioned by the American Historic Roadracing Motorcycle Association, where he competed frequently aboard a 350-cc British AJS 7R. He has competed less in recent years, preferring street riding aboard a Honda Gold Wing or several other contemporary bikes. But his track experiences tend to explain the presence of so many racing machines in his collection.
“I have no focus, as you may have noticed,” he said of his collection, though he doesn’t consider that a problem.
Some museums specialize in one style of bike or one era or even one make, and he tends to find such places boring after a while. His collection, containing old and new racers and street bikes from all over, appears to grow mostly by whim, perhaps because he’s unfamiliar with a particular bike or because he finds its engineering interesting. For example, he talks about being offered a Honda RC30, a beautiful V-4-powered racer first campaigned in the late 1980s. His response? “Oh, why not?”
Sometimes, he admits, he can go too far in one direction: “I have too many Norton Manxes,” he said, talking about the legendary single-cylinder machines raced successfully at the Isle of Man and elsewhere.
He’s interested in Japanese motorcycles and is intrigued by the idea that one of the bikes in his collection, the Gold Wing, could be considered the most influential bike he owns–not because it’s rare, since Gold Wings have been very popular since the late ’70s, but because of how the big tourers have re-energized the motorcycling industry.
Elings works on his motorcycles himself and admits that it can be difficult to rotate bikes onto and off the museum floor, not just because space is tight. Visitors may arrive expecting to see a bike that’s off display.
The visitors who pay $5 to tour the museum, are a varied lot.
“Some people just walk in the door, walk around the floor and walk out,” he said. “To them, I think, a motorcycle is anything with a motor and two wheels. But Europeans tend to like it,” he said. (Solvang, known as a little slice of Europe, gets its share of trans-Atlantic tourists.) And the museum attracts serious enthusiasts and gearheads who, like Elings, understand the history and engineering of the mechanical beasts.
Elings isn’t sure what might show up next on his museum floor.
He is eager to display two Italian road racers he owns. He has a new Paton twin-cylinder racer, made from a 1960s design, that his son Jeff had plans to enter in vintage-class racing, and a replica of the groundbreaking V-8-powered Grand Prix racer that Moto Guzzi built in the 1950s. The V-8, in Italy being restored, should draw lots of attention when it goes on display. It is hoped that will be in early June.
He’s frequently asked which motorcycle is his favorite. “It’s typically the last thing you bought,” he said.
“It’s hard to have favorites. They all have different reasons for being. They do different things.”
Elings doesn’t seem to focus on the investment value of his collection. “They’re all valued not so much in dollars,” he said. “Plus, I can look at them.”
And, when the mood strikes, he can fire them up and go for a ride.
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If you go
The Vintage Motorcycle Museum is at 320 Alisal Rd., Solvang, CA 93463. Admission costs $5. The museum is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday and by appointment weekdays. Call 805-686-9522 or visit www.motosolvang.com.
