My home track, Cadwell Park in Lincolnshire. This is the Vincent Owners' Club High Speed Trials, 1967. I'm waiting for the 'out' on my Curtis Vincent Special #32. In this line- up is Roger Slater on bike #2. He became the Egli-Vincent distributor for the UK.
Photo courtesy of the Vincent-HRD Owners Club and Geoff Preece.
Photo courtesy of Ken Landon
A photo of the first time the Curtis Vincent Special was raced at Cadwell Park in Lincolnshire. The bike used a 998cc Vincent V-twin engine with the standard transmission/gearbox removed. The engine was mated to a Manx Norton 4-speed gearbox/transmission. I built this bike in 1966/67 to compete in the Clubman Open racing class.
I used a Manx Norton frame and re-engineered it to put the Vincent engine crankshaft on the same centre-line as the original Manx Norton engine. The frame had to be extensively modified – as you can see from the photo, the front down tubes have been removed. The engine had been modified for racing to “Lightning spec”. I even used the Manx Norton central oil tank. Dunlop racing tyres were used and Girling shocks. It was a cold day and I scared myself silly on this thing. It was my first outing on those old triangular tyres and you needed to get some heat into them so they would work properly.
These are all photographs of the Curtis Vincent Special parked beside my BMC Mini. The bike was bigger than the car! The exhaust note was loud.
I had two set-ups for different race tracks. For Snetterton and the long track at Cadwell I used 1 & 5/16" Amal 5 GP2 carburetors on special adaptors. For shorter tracks I used 1 & 1/8" Amal monoblock carbs.
The bike had lots of torque, and handled really well. After a couple of seasons I realized that I wasn't a very good road racer, as I was more interested in building great handling machinery than racing them.
