Floydian Technicalities

Before we go further into the tangled web of actual latter-day Floyd retrieval and subsequent restoration (knock on wood; I have a Telex waiting from Signore Capodanno, my man in the south) perhaps it will be of some service to review, precisely, what is and what is not a Floyd. At left is not an original Floyd, although after Verner's death in 1963 there was an ill-fated attempt to revive the marque. This amounted to nothing more than emblazoning the trademark Spenserian script onto a seemingly meaningless array of products. The Floyd coffee percolator met with some little household success in the nostalgic early 80s', but there is nothing here to suggest that this example bears any relationship to a bicycle. It is likely amateurish homage paid by a island-dwelling race fan of the time.


This Floyd met with an equally dastardly end, and you might make a case that neither is this example an original. By 1930s' the telephone, the wireless telegram, and the automobile, all conspired to make the world too small for the "Sagebrush Robinhood", and he was gunned down in 1934. Equally legendary, unequivocally un-bicycle.




Ahh, this is more like it. While from the angle of the camera in the photo on the left we do not know the exact year and model, this is by all accounts an early Floyd frame built while still on the Bianchi team in the late 1950s'. From the scenery, I would say that this is a shot from Sardinia, before the start of a race. The rider is most likely Busi or Verner, two of Bianchi's pride, judging from the luxurious delivery system to the starting line. Note the rider in the background; not everyone received such kingly treatment. Floydian certitude: highly likely.



At right, a Molteni rider with his drilled and fluted Eddy Merckx bicycle, likely made by Ernesto Colnago, a colleague and equal of Verner's. Shares much of the same drilling common to racers of the time; Busi's proposed Floyd was to be drilled to such an extent as Verner found dangerously excessive and excessively fashionable, neither of which he found reason enough.



Nobody is really sure what this one is; it might be a bicycle.

Sing a Song of Floyd

I have received a windfall missive from one of my men. Scouring the Italian countryside armed with Carte Blanche, combing the dusty courtyards of crumbling Tuscan villas', the great glassed front windows of grand old Northern hotel bars, peering through the tarred knot holes of sea-drunken Sicilian fishing lockers, they are searching for the stuff of cycling legend. Hand built to order, only about 50 Floyd bicycle frames were ever finished before the untimely and unfortunate death of Vittorio Verner in 1962. Details are few and hazy at best, but most of the myth surrounding the builders death revolves around a personal grudge with a member of the Bianchi team, whose company Verner was forced to leave after refusing to build a frame for Bianchi's show horse, Giancarlo Busi. Verner regarded Busi as a showboat and an ass, and wanted no part of his growing legacy to be attached to a racer whose results did not match his popular status, a furor which found no end of sensationalized reception in the manic Italian press. It was a year later, during the final descent of a club friendly in the mountains above Lake Como, that a stick found its way in into the front wheel of Verner's personal Floyd, and in the rain above Bellagio, coupled with the notorious inability of steel rims and leather brake pads of the time, Verner fell, was run over by the pack he was leading, and was killed. It is for these frames, these precious and groundbreaking bicycle frames, that I have come to Italy, and why I have enlisted the help of 6 old men, natives to their region and still mindful of a time when the forgotten Floyd was king of the road, to help me restore the Floyd to its former place of glory.