Beschreibung:

Zenith motorcycles were manufactured from 1905 until 1950, in a variety of factories in or around London. From the early days proprietary engines were used, such as Fafnir, Precision, JAP, Bradshaw and Villiers. The driving force behind Zenith was Chief Engineer, and company owner, Frederick Barnes, who was responsible for the famous ‘Gradua’ gear. Worked by a crank handle, the Gradua mechanism varied the diameter of the engine pulley while simultaneously sliding the rear wheel back and forth in the fork slots, thus maintaining correct belt tension. Its advantages showed most effectively in speed hill climbs, and in pre-WW1 days Zenith machines gained many successes as the Zenith rider could change gear during the ascent while the other competitors had to make do with a single choice of ratio. Rival riders and manufacturers thought that this was an unfair advantage so many leading clubs excluded Zeniths from their hill climbs. Zenith was quick to recognise the publicity value and took the word ‘Barred’ as their trademark. Although the expensive Gradua system gave way to a more conventional Sturmey-Archer countershaft gearbox in the 1920s, Zenith continued to pursue its racing and record breaking activities with enthusiasm. Fred Barnes himself enjoyed considerable success at Brooklands, where in 1922 Zenith rider Bert Le Vack became the first man to lap at over 100mph on a motorcycle – in the rain. In 1928 a Zenith-JAP ridden by Oliver Baldwin established a world motorcycle speed record of 124.62mph at Arpajon in France, while Joe Wright later raised the record to 150.736mph using his supercharged Zenith-JAP ‘reserve bike’, his favoured OEC having succumbed to mechanical problems. Significantly, when Wright’s record was set, in 1930, the company was temporarily out of business. Despite adding a Villiers-powered economy model to the range, Zenith failed to weather the financial storms of the early ’30s. After a succession of closures and changes of ownership it re-emerged after WW2 with a solitary model: a 750cc JAP-powered sidevalve v-twin, which lasted only a few more years. Dating from Zenith’s Vintage years heyday, this magnificent Zenith-JAP was supplied new via Blay’s of Twickenham to Roland Martin in April 1927 and later was united with its AJS-manufactured Graiseley TT Model 259 racing sidecar. The original bills of sale for both motorcycle and sidecar are on file. Roland Martin was one of the few private owners who had their own workshop at Brooklands, and earned his living by preparing and tuning other people’s machines for racing. He started racing solos, but his real love was motorcycle combinations, and the KTOR-engined Zenith represented just about the best you could buy for £140 in 1927. The machine comes with a file of fascinating documentation, including a letter from Tony Donnithorne, the VMCC’s Zenith marque specialist, who first became acquainted with ‘ML 3081’ in the 1960s. In his letter, Mr Donnithorne observes that Zenith, being a relatively small concern, was prepared to build machines to the requirements of individual customers, resulting in many leaving the factory in virtually ‘works’ specification. Indeed, ‘ML 3081’ would have been supplied to special order as Zenith did not list a 980cc overhead-valve racer in its catalogue at the time. This machine’s JAP KTOR racing engine - listed as the ‘8/45hp’ - produced 45bhp and was the most powerful available to the private owner, the slightly more potent JTOR, rated at 8/50hp, being reserved exclusively for works riders. The cradle-type frame was based on the design used by Zeniths for its World Record machines and was sufficiently rigid to cope with the rough tracks encountered in the 1920s, Brooklands included. By the late 1960s, ‘ML 3081’ had passed into the ownership of Neil (‘Steve’) Stevenson, a VMCC member who owned a garage at Virginia Water and had bought the Zenith directly from Roland Martin. (The accompanying original buff logbook records a chang