Laid out on a table in the dining room were the pieces of paper that told the life story of Neil Hinks’ Triumph Twenty-one. Not that he’d owned it from the very beginning, saving every document and scrap of a receipt over the years, together with lists of things to do, service and repair. Far from it. “I was car mad in my youth and anyway, growing up in South Africa, I had no experience of the teen motorcycle culture, living and breathing motorcycles, that you had in England. So I came at motorcycling from a totally different perspective.”
In fact it wasn’t until Neil was settled down in the UK and well established in a career working on helicopter flight control systems that he reached the rather practical conclusion that a motorcycle would make a very efficient means of getting back and forwards to work each day. Encouraged by his motorcycling father-in-law, who gave him a Honda C90 step-thru as a means of testing the water, he enrolled on a Star Rider training course and never looked back. “I didn’t stick with the Cub for very long,” admits Neil. “Well, it’s not really motorcycling, is it?” Do we sense that a seed had been sown?
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