1973 Vespa Sprint Veloce Series 2  ADVERTISEMENT Putting out the fire - with gasoline Five engines later, Sandy Symeonides has finally got what he was looking for. Until the nitrous kit arrives, that is.
Words & photography by JEREMY BOWDLER So the photoshoot is over, the back lane in Sydney's Darlinghurst is quiet, but the peace is about the be shattered as Sandy cranks up the Vespa in search of the perfect burnout to sign off the shoot. The staccato two-stroke exhaust note changes to a highpitched shriek as the revs climb and the rear tyre struggles to break traction. Then the police car turns into the lane and comes to a stop two metres behind Sandy, who's completely oblivious to its presence.
I have two choices. Turn and run, which is looking pretty attractive, or face the music. I lower the camera, and walk over to the howling Vespa, telling Sandy to turn it off. Game over.
Sandy wheels the scooter to one side of the lane, the patrol car glides up to me and the window comes down. Time for a chat.
"I wouldn't leave your bag there, mate. There are a lot of thieves round here."
And the window goes up and the patrol car goes about its business and the black cloud goes away.
 There must be something about Vespas that makes a difference, though if they had known what this particular Vespa was, we might not have got away so lightly.
"It's all about being creative and being passionate," says Sandy Symeonides, the Vespa's owner and creator. "It's about loving what you’re doing with these scooters. You'll always have problems on the way, it’s just a matter of overcoming them..."
The 1973 Series 2 Vespa Sprint Veloce in question is good for 13.9s on the dragstrip, pumps out 21kW at the rear wheel, cruises at 120km/h and tops out at just less than the Imperial ton, at 153km/h. So how did a cheap runabout commuter turn feral?
Sandy bought the "pile of nothing" second- hand in London £600 and it was a pile of nothing. It was also his first scooter and the beginning not only of a long-term affair but a long-term career.
"In the first month I had the bike fully rebuilt to standard and resprayed by hand (by me). I soon realised I didn’t have enough power so I started asking a lot of guys round the UK scene the best way of tuning."
That led to an obsession and that led to a job offer to run the workshop and restoration business attached to Gasoline Garage, a classic scooter themed cafe in Darlinghurst and home of a burgeoning local scooter scene.
"For me, the central thing in building a Vespa is always the engine," Sandy continues. "Getting the engine right and getting it in there from the start, making it 100 per cent reliable and then building the bike around it is the way to go.
"This is literally engine number five. I’ve got a couple of engines spare lying around the place that produce a fair amount of horsepower but are still working and still very reliable but not like this one. This is putting out peak horsepower for a normally aspirated carburated Vespa 150 engine."
The work started with a 12-volt conversion and a lot of advice from the UK scooter tuners about porting and polishing barrels, reed valves, cranks, etc and it evolved into Sandy's current occupation.
"A lot of my parts are sourced from Germany just because Vespa tuning is huge over there, so a lot of my bike comes from SIP and Worb 5 in Germany and, in the UK, Alan at Beedspeed UK, Taffspeed Tuning, Malcolm at Scooter Emporium and Patch at Scooter Surgery have all given me insight into tuning scooter barrels and pistons and stuff like reed valving to get maximum horsepower without sacrificing reliability or rideability."
 The Sprint Veloce has an MRB four-petal reed valve and runs a 30mm Dell'Orto flatslide carb and fuel pump which make sure the engine doesn't suffer from fuel starvation (a problem in some circumstances thanks to the original gravity fuel feed)
"The carb gives me a lot of low down horsepower where I need it and by adding the Dell’Orto fuel pump I’ve eliminated any chance of the fuel starvation especially with an engine that wants to breathe as hard as this engine does, " adds Sandy.
The pipe is from SIP and is tuned for low-down torque to add driveability to the power the scooter pumps out.
The head was modified by the German Suzuki Race Team to take a centrally mounted sparkplug and to offer a compression ration (around 10.0:1) that will not only take normal fuel, but also a 50/50 Avgas blend.
The Malossi 172cc barrel and piston have been matched, ported and polished to within an inch of their life by Beedspeed UK, but without taking so much metal away that the tuning makes the barrel weak. A Worb 5 high quality fullcircle crank eliminates wobble in the big end bearing and, according to Sandy, are perfect to run in these engines.
The HP4 flywheel has been lightened, from 2700g to 1800g, so the engine spins to higher rpm and accelerates far more quickly. There’s a little sacrifice in rideability, but once the bike does hit the powerband, it flies.
 The clutch is a 21-tooth unit from the Coaster model and is reinforced with a metal ring on the outside to stop any chance of the clutch basket vibrating and cracking itself loose. The clutch’s reinforced springs make it stronger than normal Vespa clutches so the clutch plates wear less, you get a very smooth change and you eliminate the need to be “a 120kg power lifter” to operate it.
Work on the chassis started with the suspension and Bitubo shocks. An SIP wide tyre kit was fitted at the back for better straight-line performance and handling. The wider tyre at the rear requires a lot of modification to the swingarm, but it makes a huge difference to the handling. It’s a 130/70 tyre, which is pretty much as big as you can go.
At the front, the suspension was lowered by an inch so the bike sits lower and Sandy gets less wheel lift.
Surprisingly, the brakes are standard, with Sandy’s philosophy being drum brakes are fantastic as long as you maintain them. Keep the drums clean from dirt and grease and you’ll never have an issue.
“I’m running close to a 30hp engine in this and it stops on a dime. The next mod however, if I do fit a nitrous kit will be a front disc brake conversions which we at Gasoline are working on – a disc brake conversion for all types of scooters.
“I then moved on to the engine, which is based on a P5 150cc engine and built it from there up. After I had perfected the engine, which took me two attempts at getting it right and tweaking it correctly, I started a full respray of the bike, sandblasted it back to the bare metal and any modifications I needed to do to the chassis or the body were done in the process.”
The fastback seat is an SIP fibreglass unit from Germany. On newer scooters it doesn’t look so good, but on the classic models it just accentuates the whole line of the bike. It’s a very reliable but very quick Vespa that still maintains the classic style of the old Vespas but has a very special, unique, racer look.”
 Overall lines are one thing, but with a show scooter, it’s the special little details that set it apart.
There are little LEDs that light up in the speedometer; a quick action Tommaselli grip modified for a scooter; braided lines everywhere; and chrome...
“I spent a lot of money on chrome,” Sandy remembers, “which is usually against my ethic. My ethic is chrome doesn’t bring you home, while matt black always brings you back. But I thought, for a show bike that I’d do a lot of chroming on bits and parts, like forks to really set the bike off.
“I’ve been a Vespa and Lambretta mechanic for 10 years and, as a result of that knowledge, I’ve put everything I know into this one scooter, seeing it is my first love and my biggest passion.”
As published in TW SCOOTER MAGAZINE - 26/05/2005
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