Scottish town to welcome 1,300 Lambretta fans this weekend
If you like your two-wheelers smoky, loud and slow, you’ll want to head to Scotland this weekend where hundreds are gathering to celebrate Lambretta.
When you think of Lambretta scooters, what do you think of? That’s right, Scotland. Specifically small, windswept towns on the country’s west coast.
Or, at least, that’s what more than a thousand Lambretta enthusiasts will be thinking about this weekend as they arrive in Ayr for EuroLambretta 2025 - an annual event that sees riders from all across the world converge on a different destination each year.
How Ayr got chosen for this year’s spot is anyone’s guess. Last year’s event was at Magny-Cours in France. Probably better weather there. But, hey, adventure is what you make it. And there’s no doubt that riding a decades-old scooter to a town that’s about 35 miles south of Glasgow will be an adventure.
Lambretta was founded in 1922. Along with those made by Vespa, its scooters came to define what many of us think of as the traditional scooter look.
“They're these stupid looking wee shopping trollies that we've all fallen in love with,” Lambretta Club of Scotland chairman John McMillan told BBC Scotland.
The brand ceased to be a fully Italian affair in the early 1970s, with production shifting to India and thereafter getting lost in the copyright/rebranding/copying miasma that defines the end of many iconic brands.
Theoretically, Lambretta lives on today - seemingly as a fashion brand that happens to sell a scooter. But it’s a good bet that the originals will be on the hearts and minds of people showing up in Ayr this weekend.
Lambrettas were, of course, a major part of the UK’s Mod culture of the 1960s. It was a Lambretta Li 150 Series 3 that Phil Daniels’ character Jimmy chucked off a cliff at the end of Quadrophenia (spoiler alert), an iconic 1979 film that celebrates Mod culture. It was that film that inspired John McMillan to get into Lambrettas.
“I saw Quadrophenia… and I was hooked,” he told BBC Scotland. “All I wanted was a Lambretta. The one I currently use I've had since I was 17, so it's been there for almost the whole of my life.”
Roughly 1,300 scooterists are expected to hit Ayr this week, making this one of the more successful EuroLambretta gatherings in its 34-year history.
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Chris Cope is a fourth-generation journalist, originally from Texas. He has lived in the UK for roughly two decades and has been writing about motorcycles for most of that time. He has written for dozens of publications and websites in the UK, US, Canada, and Australia.
