And the Cyclone takes the lead yet again!
In the pantheon of American speed merchants, there exists a peculiar bird of paradise, dressed not in racing red or midnight black, but in defiant canary yellow. The 1915 Cyclone V-Twin, you see, never asked permission to be extraordinary. It simply was.
Consider, if you will, the audacity of it all: In an age when the Wright brothers’ first flight was barely a decade old, when the Model T Ford was still finding its legs, a small band of mechanical revolutionaries in St. Paul, Minnesota, crafted an engine that would make the Federation of American Motorcyclists scratch their collective heads in disbelief. One hundred and eleven miles per hour, they claimed. Impossible, came the response. Twenty miles per hour faster than any recorded speed? Preposterous. And yet, there it was, screaming across the wooden boards of Omaha’s track like a banshee with something to prove.
The Cyclone’s tale is quintessentially American – brief, brilliant, and ultimately tragic. Just three years of production, from 1913 to 1917, but oh, what years they were. Its 45 horsepower V-Twin engine wasn’t just advanced; it was prescient, a glimpse into a future that wouldn’t arrive for decades. The controls, in that wonderfully contrary American way, were precisely backward from what you’d expect: throttle in the left hand, clutch on the right. Because why make it easy when you can make it memorable?
And memorable it remained, sleeping in barns and private collections until men like Stephen Wright came along. Wright, you understand, isn’t just a restorer – he’s a resurrection artist, a mechanical medium who communes with the spirits of machines long past. His touch on a Cyclone is like Michelangelo’s on marble, revealing the masterpiece that was always there, waiting.
The proof? In 2015, a Wright-restored Cyclone, once the pride of Steve McQueen’s legendary collection, commanded $852,500 at auction – a king’s ransom that seemed, at the time, impossible to surpass. It became the most expensive auctioned motorcycle in history. But history, like the Cyclone itself, has a way of outrunning expectations.
On Saturday, January 31, 2025, another of these yellow speedsters (also a 1915, also restored by Stephen Wright) roared past that record, claiming a staggering $1.3 million at auction, cementing its place as the most valuable motorcycle ever sold at auction. Like the speed records it shattered, the cyclone seems equally prone to destroying all our past ideas of what a vintage motorcycle can be.
Perhaps that’s fitting for a machine that never quite played by the rules. In an era when motorcycles were either utilitarian workhorses or gentleman’s playthings, the Cyclone dared to be both outrageous and refined, a canary yellow middle finger to convention that proved, beyond any doubt, that American engineering could soar with the best of them. Even if it took the rest of us a century to catch up to its worth.
