Moto-Solvang
Moto-Solvang
One Man's Motorcycle Museum
With its polished wood floors and subdued lighting, you might mistake the former Brooks Brothers clothing store in Solvang, California, for a tastefully decorated branch bank-if it weren't filled with exotic motorcycles.
And, in fact, the Vintage Motorcycle Museum, which houses one of the best collections in the country, does serve as a kind of bank for Dr. Virgil Elings, 66, who founded it five years ago. "A visible savings account," he says of the museum's bikes. "And I can go look at them anytime I want."
You can, too. For a $5 admission fee, you'll see a stellar col lection of vintage and modern motorcycles, from Britain's AJS to China's Zingfu. With perhaps 70 bikes on display and 30 others in rotation, the museum is smaller than the vast Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum, but every machine is worth close attention. And almost all of them run.
Interested in history? Feast your eyes on the working repro duction of Karl Benz' 1903 three-wheeler, or the 1904 NSU, full of exotic levers and linkages, or the 1918 Thor, one of the original American superbikes.
Want to see interesting dead-end designs? Look for the muse um's Norton and Suzuki rotary-engined bikes, brilliant answers to questions the marketplace never asked.
Need a performance fix? How about a replica of Moto Guzzi's historic 500cc V8? Or a supercharged Vincent Black Lightning? Or two modern V-Twin roadracers, a VR1000, Harley-Davidson's expensive but disappointing bid to dominate its class, and a Britten V1000, the last of 10 innovative racebikes built in New Zealand by the late John Britten and his small crew?
"The Britten was pure adventure, and the damned thing worked," says Elings, who appreciates such noble efforts. He spent a career staying away from predictable answers. Growing up in Iowa, where a 14-year-old with a learner's permit could ride a motorcycle, he used a 1939 James to get up on two wheels, later graduating to a 650cc BSA Golden Flash. He went to trade school and planned to be a machinist, but somehow lost his way, ending up at MIT. He gravitated away from motorcycles while working toward his Ph.D in physics, but once he moved west to start the first graduate program in scientific instrumentation at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he jumped back in, buying a BSA 500.
"Things deteriorated from there," he says, and his collecting began.
I. During a 1987 sabbatical, Elings co-founded Digital Instruments, which developed scanning microscopes with reso lutions close to the atomic level. The machines quickly became
essential in the semiconductor industry and elsewhere. When UCSB claimed his participation in the suc cessful firm was a conflict of interest, he quit teaching and went into busi ness full-time.
"It was good to get out of aca demia," he says, "it's one of the least free places in the world. In business there's plenty of freedom-of course, if you lose money, there's more free dom than you'd like..."
Apparently that wasn't a problem for Elings, who ran the company for what his website calls "10 extremely successful years," then merged it with Veeco Instruments in 1998 and retired. That allowed time for Elings and one of his two Sons to become more involved in vintage motocross and roadracing, most often in AHRMA events, where Virgil raced a 350cc AJS 7R. But he has cut back on racing. "I still want to beat the bastard in front of me," he says. "That gets dangerous."
IIVIIL VI iii~, ui~ u hat gei~ uaiiyeiuu~. These days, he says, "I fart around," handling charitable activi ties, managing his ranch near Solvang, flying radio-controlled model airplanes-and searching for interesting motorcycles. "I have no focus," he says of his acquisitions. "I just buy what the hell pleases me."
There are lots of reasons to visit California's beautiful Central Coast region. The Santa Ynez Valley is a well-known wine-growing area, with more than 60 vintners (the movie Sideways was filmed there). Last winter, Lance Armstrong trained for his seventh Tour de France victory in the nearby rolling hills. Solvang, founded by immigrants from Denmark, is now a kind of Danish Disneyland, with a cute Old World downtown and many fine restaurants, hotels and resorts. And it's just a short detour if you're riding north toward William Randolph Hearst's castle at San Simeon-or the Red Bull U.S. Grand Prix at Laguna Seca Raceway next July. But one of the best reasons for motorcyclists to visit Solvang lies inside a former clothing store on the edge of town.
James F. Quinn
