RIP, Doug Bingham

Doug Bingham, a guy I admired enormously, passed away recently and I thought I would take a moment to tell you a little bit about him here on the CSC blog.

Taking Doug Bingham for a ride in a California Scooter!

I first met Doug Bingham at the annual So Cal sidecar gathering in Griffith Park (an event Doug started many years ago).   I wrote a story about that event for Motorcycle Classics magazine (you can read about it here), and a big part of the story was about Doug.   He was known in the motorcycle industry as “Mr. Sidecar,” and when we wanted to equip one of our Mustang replicas with a sidecar, we knew there was only one guy to see:  Doug Bingham.

Doug knew exactly what to do, and the rig he put together for us was awesome.   I visited his So Cal shop as he was finalizing construction, and before I knew it, Doug pushed the California Scooter out of his shop, hopped in the sidecar, and gave the keys to me.   It was a hell of treat.   Little old me, piloting a sidecar, with none other than Doug Bingham as my passenger!

Let me tell you a bit about this man.   If you’ve ever seen a movie with a sidecar in it, Doug Bingham would have been the guy who built and piloted the rig.  Think The Great Escape, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and many, many more.   With all those good things on his resume, Doug was Mr. Nice Guy.  He was not pretentious at all, he took all the time I needed to explain things to me about sidecars, and he was a real decent human being.  I enjoyed being around him immensely.

If you’ve wondered what it is like to pilot and ride in a sidecar, you can get a bit of a feel for it from this YouTube video we did featuring the rig Doug built for us…

RIP, Doug.   We’ll miss you.