If you saw the 2005 movie World’s Fastest Indian, you may remember a scene in which the Kiwi hero, Burt Munro (played by Anthony Hopkins) is drag-racing down a New Zealand beach, passing up some slower guys and then getting into a nasty tank-slapper and crashing. Turns out that the racebike he was riding wasn’t an Indian, but a 1936 Velocette. Still, that cinematographic slight didn’t seem to devalue the machine in question much: on March 18, it sold at auction for over $37,000.
According to the auction catalog, Munro and lifelong pal Duncan Meikle both purchased Velos in 1956 and proceeded to tune them into class-conquering dragracers. The bike at auction was Meikle’s; Munro and Meikle wrenched on, developed and rode each other’s bikes. You can see the customized frame, crash-damaged windscreen and knobby tires in the illustration (courtesy of Webb’s Auction House); the knobs were for grip on the sandy beach of Munro and Meikle’s Teretonga dragstrip.
The high bidder was a New Zealand motorcycle collector, prompting applause from a crowd happy to see the bike would remain in Munro’s homeland. You can watch a video of the bike here, and see the other bikes sold in the lot, including a rare transverse V-Twin AJS and a 1928 SC1 Norton.
