Refining and simplifying the original title while retaining the targeted audience information, the revised title is: Ton Up!: A Century of Cafe Racer Speed and Style

The culture of youthful, reckless speed did not begin with the motorcycle. For thousands of years, the fastest travel was the horse, and subcultures of fast horsemen populate the folk tales of many societies. A fast horse was a point of tremendous pride and identity for its rider, and like-minded riders affected styles of dress and speech peculiar to their inclinations. Reckless young riders were decried as hooligans, and the preening, fashion-conscious speed lover was never a beloved figure except in envious condemnation.

Mat Oxley mentions such trends in his excellent book Speed: The One Genuinely Modern Pleasure, with riders adopting particular fashions and modes of speech as spice for their lust for speed on public roads. He writes, "At the height of the Georgian era, less than a century before the internal combustion engine exploded onto the scene, Britain's wealthy ne'er do wells sought ever more decadent ways in which to fritter away their riches on thrill seeking. The Four Horse Club was established in the early nineteenth century by a bunch of mad, bad aristocrats who enjoyed racing each other in their horsedrawn carriages. . . . They were so keen to appear genuine that they learned to eff and blind like their servants. One member of the Four Horse Club had several teeth removed, so he could spit like a grizzled coachman as he charged around the streets like the world's first joyrider."

The sporting champion on two and four wheels, Giosué Guippone, raced for Peugeot on monsters like the 1905 12 horsepower track bike weighing 110 pounds. The earnest look of the young man on his brand new 1909 Indian V-twin tells the tale. He's primed for a street race with goggles at the ready. Ernst Neumann, a German artist living in Paris who later built Neander motorcycles, rides a 1904 Griffon V-twin in an amazing fur coat.

Harley-Davidson tried its hand at international level road racing with the VR1000 project and built the 1993 VR1000 roadster as a homologation special. The rise of nostalgia culture brought attention to historic design, inspiring new customs with vintage style as with J. Regers's road-legal Honda CBX café racer in '60s factory GP livery. The 1990s saw performance coalesce into extremely rideable hyper café racers, like the 1999 Yamaha YZF-R6, a shockingly competent, 430-pound, 600cc beast with 150 miles per hour on tap.

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