No, it’s a cyclecar!

Arguably, the cyclecar is a homeless vehicle. Many were built using a large proportion of motorcycle parts, including variously engine, gearbox, clutch, wheels, brakes and sundries than from any other source. But with three or four wheels, it is not a motorcycle. Likewise, with so many non-car components, in the eyes of many period observers, it wasn’t a car either.

In period, classes for cyclecars were included in many motorcycle reliability trials, hillclimbs and speed events, including at Brooklands. Significantly, there has never been an IoM Cyclecar TT alongside the annual motorcycle races. Likewise, some car events included a cyclecar class, but they weren’t universally accepted at all motorcycle or car events. There were plans for a standalone Cyclecar TT, but the First World War saw to that.

To complicate this discussion (which is going nowhere) do we accept the core dates of cyclecar production as 1910-1925? It has been written by occasional scribes that quadricycles built for a few years from the late Victorian period were the forerunner of the cyclecar – not a thought that is favoured by this columnist, as the quadricycle possesses many design features found with period tricycles from De Dion, Progress, Beeston et al. Okay, but what about forecar design? Really, examples by makers such as Humber were initially motorcycles with forecar attachments, but by 1904/7, they’d evolved into three-wheeled vehicles which, by design, couldn’t be reconverted to motorcycles, which leads to the question: ‘Why aren’t these cyclecars?’ when the later Morgan, for example, was initially considered