Why is it called a cafe racer? The real Ace Cafe story

Every time Rajputana Customs or Eimor Customs strips down a Royal Enfield Classic 350 and calls the result a cafe racer, they are borrowing a name that started at one roadside cafe in north west London. The term has nothing to do with coffee and everything to do with a 1938 transport stop called the Ace Cafe.

The Ace Cafe and the ton up boys

The Ace Cafe opened in 1938 next to the newly built North Circular Road, serving lorry drivers and travellers, according to its Wikipedia entry. By the 1950s it had become the main gathering point for young motorcyclists who modified ordinary production bikes, mostly Triumphs, BSAs and Nortons, for speed and quick handling over short runs between cafes. These riders were called rockers or ton up boys, a reference to their goal of touching 100 miles an hour, and the bikes they built for the job became known as cafe racers.

A famous hybrid of the era was the Triton, a Triumph Bonneville engine dropped into a Norton Featherbed frame, alongside combinations like the Tribsa and the NorVin, per the Wikipedia entry on cafe racers. The Ace Cafe closed in 1969 after a new motorway service station opened on the M1, then reopened in 1997 following a reunion organised by Mark Wilsmore, the same Wikipedia page notes.

The jukebox race that may not be true

The story most riders repeat is that a rocker would start a song on the cafe jukebox, race to a landmark and back, and try to return before the record finished. According to the Wikipedia entry on cafe racers, motorcycle writer Mike Seate has argued this record racing is a myth that actually originated in an episode of the British television show Dixon of Dock Green, not in real life at the Ace Cafe. The legend stuck because it explained the name neatly. The documented part is simpler: these were production bikes raced between cafes, and the style that came out of it, low bars, a solo seat, a small fairing, eventually got exported everywhere, including to factory bikes like the Moto Guzzi Le Mans and the Harley Davidson XLCR by the late 1970s.

Why Indian builders still use the name

That 1960s London style is exactly what Jaipur based Rajputana Customs built into Vigilante, a Royal Enfield Continental GT 650 with a rebuilt trellis subframe, Showa forks borrowed from a Ducati 848 EVO, Brembo brakes and a GP style exhaust, tested at the Buddh International Circuit, as reported by Bike EXIF. Shop owner Vijay Singh told the outlet that being commissioned by Royal Enfield for the build felt like "acceptance at last." Hyderabad's Eimor Customs has built its own run of cafe racers on the Royal Enfield Classic 350, including a build called Envy with a smaller front fender, a new tank and a flatbed seat, according to coverage on CarToq and 350cc.com.

None of this needs the jukebox myth to matter in India. The word survived because the recipe, a comfortable commuter bike cut down for speed and good looks, still works on an Indian high street the way it worked on the North Circular sixty years ago. The Bike Shed Motorcycle Club in London, which grew out of a blog about this same new wave of custom builds, is one of the venues that still treats the cafe racer as the template every custom scene keeps returning to.

Sources

• Café racer, Wikipedia
• Ace Cafe, Wikipedia
• Vigilante: Royal Enfield café racer by Rajputana Customs, Bike EXIF
• Eimor Envy is a Royal Enfield Classic 350 in hot cafe racer clothes, CarToq