Mister Rudge & Oldtimer 

  about Helmut Krackowizer - well-known as "Mister Rudge"

• My father, the "Motorcycle-Professor"

  

      Until the last days he was riding, in the saddle of his beloved Rudge, Velocette, Sunbeam racing motorcycles or indeed in saddles of other motorcycle brands. The main thing, old and real! With an expert's eye he diagnosed if on a vintage motorcycle anything was original or incorrect. Not least of all because he had grown up with these bikes and as a teenager he helped during the summer months in a motorcycle workshop.
  Beholding a vintage racing bike in older design, you could be almost certain that he also had known the history of it, sometimes he even had known of this particular motorcycle, who had ridden it, what successes had been achieved it and what was not original (see above).

• My father, the collector

  

      My father felt at home at circuits, between and on motorcycles and in vintage museums. Very soon, probably around 1960, he had started to to collect what had been motorcycle history, motorcycle or motorcycle racing technology turned from the beginning (around 1900) until around the 1960s. Thus, old motorcycle magazines are just as contemporary images as well as numerous books and many letters late racers are to be found in his archive.
      This "legacy" rests in an archive that I am responsible for since his death.
  
  

• My father and his friends

  

      Important to him were his friends. And he had many of them, everywhere in Europe, in Switzerland, France, certainly in the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria, but also and perhaps above all in England. A trip to England, for example, never took him straight back there or from there. Visiting friends had been a matter of course. Many of them he become acquainted with during his active racing time from 1946 to 1955.

  Author:

  Peter Krackowizer

  Date:

  renewed in March 2011