Friday, June 20, 2008

From my Archive, some views of the Velocette stand at the 1948 Earles Court Motor Cycle Show..

The 1948 Earles Court motor Cycle show saw the introduction of the 150cc LE Velocette, later named the Mk.1...there were Mk.2,3 and the Vogue to follow over the years, although the capacity was increased to 200cc in these models.
This was the culmination of Eugene Goodman's ( the brother of Percy Goodman a company director of Veloce Ld.) dream,.... the "Everymans machine" and the plan was for Veloce to eventually concentrate on only making these, dropping all other models.
Ironically it is considered by many to have been the model that caused Veloce to liquidate in the early 1970s...they spent a lot of the WW2 profits in tooling up for it..in fact the Lake Eirie press, need to press out the body banels was reputed to have cost £98,000 ...a fortune in todays money. As well the LE costing was worked out on a production run of 300 machines a week, when in reality, making only LE's the best they obtained was around 165 per week. Effectively they sold them below cost.
The photo of the LE on the show stand, indicates the interest from the general public.
The other photo shows two Mk.8 KTT production racers with the 1948 IOM Junior TT trophy, won by Veloce, in between.
Left click on photos to enlarge

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