Very few “motorcycle” books ever get published, and when they do, they often go unnoticed, gathering dust in the more obscure and out-of-the-way shelves in bookshops. “Big Sid’s Vincati. The Story of a Father, a Son and the Motorcycle of a Lifetime” is just one of those books.
The main protagonist of Vincati is “Big” Sid Biberman, an ageing mountain of a man whose claim to fame is that of having been one of the foremost North American experts on tuning Vincent motorcycles. The book, written by his son Matthew Biberman (a professor of creative writing and literature at Louisville University) opens at the side of Big Sid’s hospital bed, as he waits to undergo emergency open-heart surgery after having suffered a serious heart attack. He has apparently lost the will to live and, on the spur of the moment, his son comes up with a plan to build one of motorcycling’s rarer exotic hybrids, a Vincati.
At this juncture I should perhaps pause and explain what a Vincati is. Put simply it is a Vincent engine bolted into a – fairly modified – Ducati 750 GT frame. As such it is one of those creations that give Vincent enthusiasts and Ducati cognoscenti apoplexy attacks. You can’t buy one of these motorcycles over the counter, so they are usually the fruit of a slightly zany mechanic’s hard toil in his home workshop.
Right, back to the book. Saying that this is just a motorcycle book would be over-simplifying it altogether. True, bikes run through it on every page, but there is more to it than that. It is in fact an account of how a father and son who have grown apart come together and learn to coexist – pretty much for the first time in their lives – thanks to the creation of the mythical Vincati, which in itself leads to the father coming out of retirement and resuming his trade with help from his son.
