Big Sid Speaks
Big Sid SPEAKS
Hanging out with Mr. Biberman
Sidney "Big Sid" Biberman is what might you might call the Real Thing. He was not actually present at The Creation in 1936, when Phil Vincent and engineer Phil Irving revealed their first Rapide VTwin in England, but he got a pretty early start.
In 1944,14-year-old Sid put a Whizzer kit on his Schwinn, then advanced through an AJS Single and a Matchless Twin before a test ride on a friend's Vincent Black Shadow in 1950 ruined him for other bikes. Working at an Indian dealership in Norfolk, Virginia,
he uncrated a
new Chinese Red
1951 Touring
Rapide, fell in
love with the bike
and bought it.
He barely got the bike brokenin before he was drafted into the Army. He spent two years repairing trucks in Germany but still managed to make
a 1953 side
trip to Stevenage, England, to visit the Vincent factory. By chance, he arrived during the annual Vincent Club Rally, got to see half the Vincents in England (including the legendary works racer “Gunga Din”) and to meet Mr. and Mrs. Phil Vincent. While there, he began tracking down the performance parts to turn his Rapide into a Lightning-spec bike.
He’s been modifying, drag racing, restoring and tuning Vincents ever since and, until retirement in 1992, ran his own motorcycle shop in Norfolk. Working with son Matthew, he’s even written an excellent book, Vincents with Big Sid, about the whole era.
Sid is a kind and thoughtful man of keen insight, and when we talk on the phone every few months I always wish I had a note pad. He’s a born philosopher for whom motorcycles reveal various forms of truth. A few of his comments from my recent visit to Louisville:
“What you need with Vincents is the Tuning Attitude. A lot of tools don’t help. You can’t be arrogant. Arrogance is a wall between you and the motor. The way a motor runs is its voice.
You have to listen to it. The engine is the master and you are the servant; you have to approach it in a spirit of humility. Listen to it. It will tell you what it wants. It’s a living entity and it wants optimum circumstances. It wants oxygen, fuel, timing.”
Of his early-Fifties tuning efforts with the Rapide, he told me,
“We believed we had the fastest bike in the world, so we had to race everybody. It led to a lonely life—you ended up riding alone.” Sid doesn’t ride at all any more. He had a minor accident on his SV650 not too long ago and, between his heart and knee problems from an old riding injury (“I flew over my first car in 1949”), decided he should hang it up. “That’s a terribly hard decision,” he told me. “There’s something about a motorcycle that’s very freedom-inspiring, a release from the vertical, the ability to bank like an airplane.”
Riding or not, Sid is still more active with bikes than most of us. He and Matthew are working on their next book, a collection of Vincent factory service notes interspersed
factory notes interspersed with Sid’s own comments and deep knowledge of the bikes. Also, he got his Vincati built.
Of that project, Sid talks about the generosity of everyone who helped with knowledge and parts, and says, simply, “It’s a human-interest story of the motorcycle clan, where love transcends monetary values.”
Peter Egan
