There's nothing like riding one of the rarest machines in the vintage trials world straight into a bog. Why not - let me count the reasons. Plus, every so often, a modern dirt bike zoomed by, at a speed about ten times that of the vintage plonker, and I didn't want to get run over by something with so much suspension that the rider would hardly notice he'd hit anything but a rather oily boulder. Mainly I was awed by the bike's forty year old reputation. Over the years, the legend has grown that the works bikes were exotically, unobtainably different to the bikes that the customers rode.
Appearances tend to support the legend.
This Enfield's magnesium crankcases are painted gold, possibly to protect them from corrosion, possibly to grind in to the privateer's mind just how much more money the factories had. In an era when trials success lead to roadster sales, winning justified exotic components, yet the limited sales of trials bikes themselves seldom justified the production of works replicas. Of course, those roadster sales could be jeopardized if the unlucky consumer found out just how different the factory bikes really were from the production slugs. But with the connivance of the industry-dominated press, they never did. On this bike, reportedly used by Enfield star Johnny Brittain in 1958 in 500cc events, just about everything that matters is lightened.