Built in Stevenage, England, in the 1950s, the 1,000cc Vincent V-Twin was billed as “The World’s Fastest Standard Motorcycle.” Expensive, exotic, loud, and very fast, with a shiny black stove-enameled engine, two into-one faired exhausts, dual Amal carburetors, four sets of finned brake drums, knock-off wheels, and a 150-mile-per-hour Smiths speedometer, the Black Shadow was, and still is, the stuff of legends. Singer-songwriter Richard Thompson sang about a Vincent in his song “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” and a contemporary rock band goes by the name “The Vincent Black Shadow.”

An American racer named Rollie Free took a stripped version of a stock Shadow, called a Black Lightning, and topped 150 miles per hour at Bonneville in 1950, wearing only a bathing suit and sneakers to cut wind resistance.

These fabulous bikes still appeal to people who’ve never even seen one in the metal. Roll up at a Harley gathering on a Vincent and you get instant respect. Today, they command six-figure prices, and as luck would have it, they’re still turning up.

Tonight Show host Jay Leno loves Vincent motorcycles. At last count, he owned more than a dozen. Here’s the story of one of them:

“One day, I was going down the road on my Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle, and I see a guy stopped by the side of the road on some kind of Kawasaki. So I stop and ask him if he needs any help and baaaaammmmm!!!!, I get nailed from behind by another guy on a bike. So I dented up the gas tank on my Vincent. I came out on my crutches on the Tonight Show, and I say, ‘a guy hit me on my bike. If anyone out there’s got a gas tank for a Vincent Black Shadow, gimme a call.’

“Sure enough, I get a call from an old guy in Florida who says, ‘I won’t sell you a tank, but maybe you’d like to buy a whole Vincent? I have a very early 1947 Vincent Series B Black Shadow that I bought as a G.I. in England at the end of the war, and then I shipped it back here. It was one of the first ones sold. The bronze idler gear stripped a few years afterward, and I never got around to repairing it. It’s still in my garage. And I’m really too old to ride it.’”

“I say, hmmm, a B Shadow, huh? They only made a few of those.

“It wasn’t a bad price. So I ask him to tell me the serial number, and he does, and it’s the correct F10AB/1B prefix with a really low chassis number, like 003. But I gotta double check, so I call the Vincent Club Registrar in England—this club knows where almost every Vincent ever made is, and they even have a ‘spares scheme’ that ensures that many critical replacement parts are still available, even cylinder heads. The Vincent Club guy says, ‘Oh yes, that’s the correct number, but that machine has disappeared. We think it left England in the hands of an American G.I. in 1947, but no one’s heard of it since.’

“When he told me his name, I said, ‘That’s the guy who called me. I think I know where it is.’

“I quickly call the guy back and tell him I want the bike, and we work out a pretty fair deal over the phone. It’s been languishing in his garage for decades, but it’s all there. I tell him I’ll send someone to pick it up and I’ll call in the next day or two with the arrangements. There’s a pause and he says, ‘What will you have to pay to ship the bike to California?’ I say, oh, probably about 800 bucks. So he says, ‘Would you pay me 800 bucks if I deliver the bike in my truck?’

“So I say, sure, what the heck. Three days later, this battered pickup shows up in my driveway; he’s got the Vincent and it’s an early B Shadow, all right, and there’s this bleary-eyed old guy, with his dog, who’s practically driven straight through from Florida. I gave him $1,100 bucks and considered myself lucky. I had the gear repaired, cleaned it up, and the bike is a real beauty.

“I have a lot of Vincents, but this one’s a favorite, as much for how I found it as for what it is.”

By Ken Gross. This story originally appeared in Tom Cotter’s The Vincent in the Barn.

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