CCM
A Garage in Bolton, and a Dead Factory's Parts Bin
When BSA's competition department folded in 1971, most people in the trade saw scrap and spare parts. Alan Clews saw an opportunity. Clews was no outsider dabbling in motorcycles — he'd been a serious trials and scrambles rider through the 1960s, the kind of rider who understood exactly what was wrong with the bikes he was racing and precisely how he'd fix them given the chance. When BSA's works effort collapsed, he bought up what parts he could get his hands on and started building motorcycles in his own garage. There was no grand business plan, no venture capital, just a rider with mechanical sympathy and a pile of BSA components that deserved a second life.
The first machine to come out of that effort was called the Clews Stroka, built around whatever BSA had left behind. It worked well enough, and well enough fast, that by early 1972 Clews and his wife Gail had moved the operation out of the garage and into a proper race shop on Shiffnall Street in Bolton. That address became the foundation of Clews Competition Machines — CCM — a name that would mean something very specific in motocross circles for the next half-century: a British four-stroke built by people who actually raced the things.
Building a Four-Stroke Identity in a Two-Stroke World
The early 1970s were not kind to four-stroke motocross bikes. Two-strokes were lighter, quicker off the mark, and cheaper to run, and the smart money in Europe had already moved that direction. CCM went the other way. With no access to BSA's factory engines, Clews took standard B50 500cc units — scavenged from wrecked B50 motocrossers — and reworked them extensively, eventually offering machines in both 499cc and 608cc form. The bikes were heavier and more old-fashioned than the two-strokes flooding the paddocks, but they were also brutally strong and, in the right hands, fast enough to embarrass bikes that should have walked away from them.
That reputation — a small Bolton outfit building four-strokes that could hang with the establishment — became CCM's identity for the rest of the decade. As the 1970s wore on, the range grew: a trials model joined the motocross machines, and later two-stroke scramblers appeared using Italian Hiro engines, broadening the company beyond its four-stroke roots without abandoning them. By the 1980s and into the 1990s, CCM had moved to Rotax engines and, at its peak, was turning out something in the region of 3,500 machines a year — a serious number for a company that had started in a garage with a box of secondhand BSA parts.
The Racing Years
CCM's finest hours as a pure racing marque came in 1974 and 1975, when John Banks and Vic Eastwood rode for the team. Banks, already a respected name in British motocross, finished third in the 1974 British Motocross Championship and fourth in 1975, putting the CCM inside the top five of domestic and world-level competition on repeated occasions through the mid-1970s — a genuine achievement against factory two-stroke opposition from Husqvarna, Maico, and the rest. Eastwood added to the reputation with a runner-up finish in the British Motocross Championship in 1975. Later reports of CCM riders sweeping several podium and near-podium places in the 1976 British series are sometimes repeated, but the specific finishing positions haven't been pinned down with certainty, so it's fairer to say CCM was a genuine contender in that period than to cite exact results that don't hold up under scrutiny.
The racing pedigree didn't end with the 1970s works team. Under Armstrong ownership in the 1980s, former 500cc grand prix rider Niall Mackenzie won British championships aboard an Armstrong-badged 350, and the Bolton factory built what's credited as the world's first aluminum trials bike and the first aluminum bonded chassis — genuine engineering firsts for a company that never had BSA's or Honda's resources behind it. In the 1990s the four-stroke bloodline paid off again when a CCM took the 1995 World Four-Stroke Championship, a result usually credited to the rider Donie Schmidt (sources differ on the exact spelling, with at least one American publication rendering it Donnie Schmidt, but the CCM win itself is well documented). Over the decades the roll call of riders who raced CCMs reads like a cross-section of British and international off-road talent: Mike Barnes, Bob Wright, Vic Eastwood, Dave Thorpe, Steven Sword, John Lampkin, Steve Saunders, and others. CCM even found its way into the record books away from the track, when stunt rider Eddie Kidd set a world bus-jumping record aboard one.
Armstrong, Survival, and the Long Middle Period
By the end of the 1970s, CCM was running into the financial trouble that has dogged small British manufacturers for a century. The company was taken over by the engineering firm Armstrong, with the majority share changing hands in 1981. Machines continued to carry the CCM name for a period before being rebadged as Armstrong-CCM. Under Armstrong, the company took on a role most CCM devotees still find slightly startling: building military off-road motorcycles, including the Armstrong MT500 used by the British Army, developed out of the Rotax-engined SWM XN Tornado enduro bike. It's an odd but telling footnote — a marque built by a scrambles rider ended up equipping soldiers.
Armstrong-CCM as a business didn't last the decade; it was gone by 1987, though CCM itself carried on as the surviving name. What followed is the murkiest stretch of the company's history. By most accounts, CCM passed out of Armstrong's hands toward the end of the 1980s, with some sources pointing to the Robson family taking on the brand around 1988, and there are references to the Robsons later sourcing Suzuki DR-Z400 engines for the range. The precise dates and sequence of that period haven't been reliably confirmed — different sources put the ownership changes in different years, and the timeline of when the Clews family reacquired the business is similarly unclear — so readers should treat any specific years attached to that chapter with caution. What is clear is that the Clews family eventually reclaimed the business, and CCM came back into family hands after its detour through corporate and other private ownership — a rare thing in British motorcycling, where brands more often disappear for good once they leave their founder's control.
The Clews Family Return and the Modern Machines
Under Clews family control again, CCM shifted its focus toward smaller-volume, higher-specification machines that leaned into the company's engineering reputation rather than chasing production numbers it could no longer compete on. The GP450 Adventure, introduced in 2013, captured that approach well: a hand-built aluminum frame, a BMW-sourced engine, and a curb weight under 130 kilograms, aimed squarely at riders who wanted something light and purposeful rather than another heavyweight adventure bike loaded with electronics.
The clearest statement of that philosophy came in 2017 with the Spitfire, unveiled at the Carole Nash MCN London Motorcycle Show. It paired a 600cc single-cylinder Husqvarna engine with a hand-welded T45 carbon steel frame — the same grade of steel associated with British wartime aircraft construction — and the combination of retro styling and genuine lightweight engineering struck a nerve. Production was limited to 150 units, and by most accounts the run sold out almost immediately, evidence that there was still a real market for a small British manufacturer willing to build something distinctive rather than chase the mainstream.
Alan Clews died on May 2, 2018, just shy of his eightieth birthday, and the company he'd built from a garage in Bolton passed to his son Austin, who continued developing the Spitfire concept before stepping back himself in more recent years. The company marked its founder's memory in 2022 with the CCM Heritage '71 Ti, a titanium-framed machine limited to 71 examples in reference to the year CCM was founded. Another limited edition, the RAF100, commemorated the Royal Air Force's centenary with 100 examples, each incorporating a genuine section of Spitfire wing — a nod to CCM's own long-running Spitfire nameplate and to the aircraft that shared its name.
Administration and an Uncertain Present
CCM's story took a hard turn in 2025. On June 26 of that year, the company formally entered administration after production had fallen sharply, down to around 150 bikes annually from a previous norm north of 300 — the numbers of a small manufacturer that had simply run out of road under its existing structure. In August 2025, CCM's remaining assets were acquired by Gateway Auctions Limited, a Lancashire-based industrial auctioneer, for sale through a timed online auction. There is conflicting information about what happened alongside that sale: some reports describe private investors acquiring the company itself out of administration around the same period, while others describe the Gateway Auctions deal as a straightforward liquidation of leftover stock and equipment rather than a purchase of an ongoing business. Public reporting doesn't make clear how those two accounts fit together, and the identities of any new owners haven't been disclosed.
What that leaves, for now, is a marque that is not formally dissolved but is not manufacturing either. Existing CCM owners aren't stranded: Langen Motorcycles has set up a dedicated workshop supporting servicing and sourcing components, helped by the fact that many mechanical parts are shared with KTM models, while whatever remains of the factory's own stock is being dispersed through the Gateway Auctions sale.
Where CCM Stands
Whatever happens to the CCM name next, the machines already built have a following that has nothing to do with production numbers. The Spitfire and the Heritage '71 in particular are regarded by collectors as pieces of genuinely hand-built British engineering, made in small enough runs that owning one means something. That was true of the four-stroke motocrossers John Banks raced in the 1970s and it's true of the titanium-framed specials built decades later — CCM's appeal was never about scale. It was about a Bolton workshop that started with a box of BSA parts and never quite lost the instinct to build motorcycles the way a rider, not an accountant, would want them built.