A fire-breathing Winter Model

Sometimes in life things appear that stop you in your tracks. It happened to me in 1980 – and again in 2017.

- Pete Davies

In 1980 while walking through my localtown, I was drawn to the window of mylocal dealer. Sat inside was a mustard yellow Lambretta Jet 200; it was brand-new and looking as flash as it could for 1980 (unlike the 1963 Series 3 Li 150 that I owned which was, in a word, tatty). Anyway, mustard yellow Jet 200s are not what this article is about however; this article is about a machine that stopped me in my tracks like the Jet did in 1980. This time it was another Spanish-built machine, a 1964 Winter Model which has been breathed and worked on by the crew from JB Tuning in Southend. Classy enough as a model in that it has the usual turning Spanish front mudguard, Series 2 Li looks and the use of an SX-style headset that was in use by the Spanish long before the Italians thought of it (or should that be copied it?).

What you see before you though isn’t the stock 148cc machine that rolled off of the Eibar production line in 1964. The bodywork may be the same, but there the resemblance stops. I spotted the scooter at the Scooter World Show at Newark in January. Initially I’d seen Mikey from JB Tuning moving the scooter across the show hall and just thought that it was another street racer inspired machine. How wrong I was!