Racing Legends Visit Solvang Vintage Motorcycle Museum

Italian Giacomo Agostini visited Solvang Vintage Motorcycle Museum recently.  He is considered the greatest Grand Prix racer of all time.
Italian Giacomo Agostini visited Solvang Vintage Motorcycle Museum recently. He is considered the greatest Grand Prix racer of all time.

Nostalgia was the order of the day when European motorcycle racing legends Giacomo Agostini and Phil Read, traveling with an entourage of journalists, filmmakers, friends and family, stopped in for a visit to Virgil Elings’s Vintage Motorcycle Museum in Solvang.
Elings’ is well known in the academic and financial world as a maverick physicist and inventor with 42 patents in scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopes, a former UCSB professor who walked away from tenure to found Digital Instruments in Goleta.
Equal in importance to these impressive accomplishments, in Elings’s opinion, are motorcycles, which have been an integral part of his life since he was 14, when he bought his first bike, a 1939 James 125. After college, when he left Iowa to come teach at UCSB in 1966, he rode a black 1966 BSA all the way.

Motorcycles have given Elings more than a means of transportation. They’ve served as his lifelong hobby as he worked on, restored and raced motorcycles throughout the past four decades,  including a stint of serious Grand Prix racing that he and his son, Jeff, did for several years.
An avid collector of motorcycles, after he moved to the Santa Ynez Valley around a decade ago, his motorcycle collection outgrew the guest rooms in his 10,000-square-foot Santa Ynez home, and he bought the Solvang Outlet Center on Alisal Road. He selected  the former Brooks Brothers shop for his motorcycles, where the wood floor tolerated leaking oil, and opened the motorcycle museum.

Museum owner Virgil Elings, right, and Giacomo Agostini share a laugh over a news story about one of the few times Agostini lost a race, to Mike Hailwood in 1968.  Elings acquired the clipping for his museum when he bought the same bike Hailwood rode in that race.
Museum owner Virgil Elings, right, and Giacomo Agostini share a laugh over a news story about one of the few times Agostini lost a race, to Mike Hailwood in 1968. Elings acquired the clipping for his museum when he bought the same bike Hailwood rode in that race.

Elings’s museum features an extensive collection of motorcycles dating all the way back to 1910, but as a former racer himself, the emphasis of his collection slants toward racing motorcycles.
What better place to meet up and reminisce with two of the world’s most famous Grand Prix racers?
“This particular museum is exceptional—anywhere in the world it would be, but that Virgil has it here…” said noted Speed Channel and ESPN personality Alain de Cadenet. “Among serious affectionados of vintage motorcycles, this particular museum is well known throughout the country.”

On left, New Zealander Ken McIntosh, known as the world’s foremost restorer of vintage Norton motorcycles, with British Grand Prix racer Phil Read, gives a close inspection to a replica of a V8 Moto Guzi Grand Prix racing bike on display at the Vintage Motorcycle Museum.  	In his racing years Phil Read won the Grand Prix World Championship eight times, breaking seven world titles by Agostini in 1973. Agostini  however reclaimed the world championship crown in 1975, making it his 15th world championship and establishing a world record that has never been broken.
On left, New Zealander Ken McIntosh, known as the world’s foremost restorer of vintage Norton motorcycles, with British Grand Prix racer Phil Read, gives a close inspection to a replica of a V8 Moto Guzi Grand Prix racing bike on display at the Vintage Motorcycle Museum. In his racing years Phil Read won the Grand Prix World Championship eight times, breaking seven world titles by Agostini in 1973. Agostini however reclaimed the world championship crown in 1975, making it his 15th world championship and establishing a world record that has never been broken.

Cadenet, a former race car driver,  accompanied the racers and their entourage up the coast from Los Angeles to Half Moon Bay, in a motorcade consisting of motorcycles, vans and cars, to attend the Motorcycle International Concours d’Elegance. Agostini and Read both served as honorary judges at the event and Agostini received a lifetime achievement award there.

“It’s incredible that man (Elings) had the passion to collect so many iconic bikes,” said Read, visibly impressed with the motorcycles in the museum, especially the racing bikes from his era.
Though there was deadly serious competition between Read and Agostini in their heyday, the two respected each other and remained friends.

“They were rather like pilots in combat,” said Cadernet about the rivalry between the two racers, “at the end of the day they were happy to be alive.”

This Britten V1000, shown below, a gem in Elings’ collection, is one of 10 that were made by a handful of New Zealanders, including Ken McIntosh in the photos above. In the early 1990s they were the fastest 4-stroke motorcycles in the world. All the body, including the wheels, is carbon fiber. John Britten designed the motorcycle.

This Britten V1000, a gem in Elings’ collection, is one of 10 that were made by a handful of New Zealanders, including Ken McIntosh in the photos above. In the early 1990s they were the fastest 4-stroke motorcycles in the world. All the body, including the wheels, is carbon fiber. John Britten designed the motorcycle.

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