This year’s York Cycle Rally and Festival included a retrobike show, alongside all the stalls, grass track racing, and more. A day out was on the cards, and I clocked a little cluster of Fuquays on display. Given it’s only a couple of weeks since their maker, Greg Fuquay, died, it seemed like a timely moment to find out a little more. The owner of this collection, Giles, talked me through the bikes he’d brought along.
Okay Giles, do you want to talk us through this collection? Where should we start?
Well, I think we probably should start with the brown one because that’s my first one. I was inspired by the Fuquay that Chipps had back in the day. He had one powder coated in a ‘smoky bacon’ colour. So I went for ‘beef’ with mine, and just a load of British parts, but a few American parts, sort of in tribute to the builder of the frame, because he was an American who worked in England, Norfolk I believe, and sadly passed away recently.
But yeah, so I’ve been a fan of the bikes ever since I saw them in the magazine, I couldn’t afford them, then!
So you had to wait until you grew up!
Absolutely, yeah, well, some say I haven’t done that yet, but…
Okay, so the brown ‘beef’ one was the first one, which one was next?
So then came the purple and black one, that was just a lucky find on Retrobike, and sort of a similar theme really, I went for Paul’s crakes, Middleburn cranks, Hope hubs, sort of similar spec. But this is slightly later, so we’ve got RS3s on there, where we’ve got RS1s on the brown one. Salsa stem on the brown one, but a later A-head Salsa stem on the purple and
black one. Just a different colour scheme, so I went for purple to sort of contrast with the darker purple of the frame.
But still the brown tyres?
Oh, absolutely, they were my absolute favourite tyres back in the day! But they lasted a couple of rides. Really good grip, but they wore out so quickly, it was untrue!
And then what came next in the collection then?
So then came the green Fuquay FZ1, this is probably one of Greg’s later bikes, before he quit making them. So he was toying with full suspension at that time, so there’s an Amp rear end on that. I bought this as just a frame, and on the Retrobike forum it popped up in the Ebay section, and everybody said, ‘Well, that’s an ugly looking thing!’. Myself included. But I thought, ‘well, it’s got a few bits on it, if it goes cheap enough, I’ll have it’. And when it arrived, I thought actually it looks really cool. And so I planned the build, again, Hope hubs, Middleburn cranks – anodised green spider on those, not easy to find. I don’t suppose you noticed the green Middleburn bullet valve ends as well. And I tried to deck this out with as much X-Lite stuff as possible, as well as a few kind of boutique components, like the Box brakes, they were hyper-expensive back in the day. The X-Lite stuff, I’ve got skewers, I’ve got crank bolts, I’ve got the little titanium bolts on the XTR V-brakes, they’re X-Litt stamped, stem bars, quick release, collar on the saddle.
I’ve not been able to find a seat post in that size, 27.0, so if anybody out there has got an X-Lite 27.0 seat post, try and get in touch!
This is one of my favourite bikes now I’ve built it up.
Have you ridden it?
I haven’t, I dare not, not with those tyres anyway!
Okay, so this one is super tricked out. Is that the last one in your collection or are the more?
I’ve got a couple of other Fuquays up the sleeve, but you’ll have to wait to see those!
Okay, well thank you very much for talking us through these, cheers.
If you like this sort of thing, there’ll be more retrobikes on show at the Malverns Classic in August.
