How to Identify and Date a Vintage Motobécane

Motobécane was one of the largest bicycle makers in France and in the 1970s it became one of the most common French bicycles in America. Its machines ran from children’s bicycles and plain 10-speeds to the Team Champion racer, and racing frames from the same works carried Luis Ocaña to his 1973 Tour de France win. Many of them are still on the road and the question their owners ask most is the year they were made.

There is no published key to a Motobécane frame number, so the year has to come from the bicycle as a whole: the model, the tubing, the components and the catalog that matches them. This guide starts with the one check that saves the most confusion and then works through the evidence in the order an experienced eye uses it. Readers of Ebykr will be familiar with this method.

First, is it a vintage Motobécane?

The name has had three lives and they are easy to confuse.

• Motobécane of Pantin. The original French company, founded in 1923 on the edge of Paris and famous for its Mobylette mopeds as well as its bicycles. Through the 1960s its advertising was signed with two names, “Motobécane * Motoconfort.” Motoconfort was the firm’s second brand, so a bicycle badged Motoconfort came from the same works.
• MBK. The company failed in the early 1980s and was reformed as MBK, which later passed to Yamaha. From about 1984 the French bicycles carry the MBK name instead. Sources disagree on the exact years of the failure and the takeover, so read an MBK transfer as “the mid 1980s or later” rather than as a single year.
• Motobecane USA. A separate American company now sells bicycles under the Motobecane name, made in Taiwan and China and sold largely direct to consumers. They have no connection with the French factory, whatever the transfer says. They are cheap, though.

A lugged steel road bicycle with French or Japanese parts of the 1970s and a Motobécane transfer belongs to the first group, and that is the bicycle this guide dates.

The frame number, honestly

Motobécane never published a key to its frame numbers and no Motobécane catalog explains them. What exists is a survey by collectors on the Bike Forums classic and vintage board, built up over several years from owners’ reports. It proposes three things:

• On early 1970s frames, a model number stamped on the inside of the drive-side rear dropout, with one digit inside it standing for the year.
• A separate serial on the outside of the opposite dropout that seems to run in sequence across all models.
• From about 1976, a month-and-year stamp on the underside of the bottom bracket shell.

That is a promising lead and it is not yet more than a lead. We have not been able to test it against frames dated by independent evidence and we found no such test in print. If your frame carries a stamp of either kind, compare it with the dated parts described below: when the stamp and the parts agree, you have confirmed the reading for one more bicycle, and when they disagree, the parts win. Then record it in the Ebykr Serial-Number Registry with the stamp, where it sits and the evidence that dated the bicycle. One more caution: Motobécane’s mopeds have serial charts of their own, and an engine number has nothing to say about a bicycle frame.

Identify the model from the catalog

Motobécane’s American catalog for 1979 sets out the whole range in one table, and it shows how much the model tells you. It sorts the bicycles into touring, sport and racing families and names the tubing of each.

Family	Models	Frame as the 1979 catalog describes it	Typical parts
Touring	Nomade, Nomade Sprint, Mirage, Super Mirage	“Fully lugged 2040 high resiliency tubing”	Huret, SunTour or Shimano derailleurs, SR or Shimano cranks, Normandy, Atom or Shimano hubs
Touring	Grand Touring	“Double butted VITUS 172 (3 tubes),” oval 438 mm chainstays	SunTour derailleurs, SR crank, Weinmann center-pull brakes, Normandy hubs
Sport	Grand Jubilé	“Double butted VITUS 172 (3 tubes),” oval 438 mm chainstays	SunTour Cyclone GT, SR crank, Weinmann Vainqueur 999 brakes, Normandy hubs
Sport	Grand Sprint	“Fully lugged VITUS 888 (3 tubes),” 419 mm chainstays	Shimano Altus, Sugino crank, Weinmann side-pull brakes, Atom hubs
Sport	Grand Record	“Double butted VITUS 172 (3 tubes)”	Shimano 600 throughout: derailleurs, crank, brakes and hubs
Racing	Le Champion	“Double butted REYNOLDS (8 tubes),” Campagnolo dropouts	Campagnolo Nuovo Record derailleurs and Gran Sport crank, brakes and hubs
Racing	Team Champion	“Double butted COLUMBUS (8 tubes),” Cinelli bottom bracket shell, Campagnolo dropouts	Campagnolo Record and Super Record

Two details in that table are worth carrying to the bicycle. The first is the chainstay: the catalog gives its touring frames oval stays of 438 mm “instead of 419 mm,” so a tape measure separates a Grand Touring or Grand Jubilé from the 419 mm Grand Sprint or the racing-stayed Grand Record even when the paint has gone. The second is that tubing changed under a model’s name. Owners report Reynolds 531 main tubes on Grand Records of 1973 and 1974, where the 1979 Grand Record is Vitus 172, so the tubing transfer on the seat tube tells you which Grand Record you have.

For other years, the French collectors’ site La bible du vélo has gathered Motobécane catalogs for most years from 1967 to 1985, along with a Motoconfort book of 1965. The Ebykr Catalog Archive now holds Motobécane catalogs for 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1985, five more dated by estimate to about 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976 and 1977, a catalog of the Riviera, Nobly and Nomade and a French MBK catalog of 1984 or later. It also holds Motobécane’s advertisements from the Salons of 1964 and 1966, which show the range of that decade: the RS tourer with eight speeds by Allvit, cantilever brakes and large-flange Normandy hubs in 1964, and the CL, RL and DCL with Allvit derailleurs and chromed Italian-style forks in 1966.

Read the frame

Beyond the tubing transfer, three features narrow the era. Motobécane moved most of its frames to Swiss-threaded bottom brackets in the mid 1970s, where earlier frames are French-threaded, so measure the threads before you order a bottom bracket, and treat the thread as a clue to the decade. The tricolor “M” was Motobécane’s mark through the bike-boom years and the 1979 catalog prints it in blue, white and magenta on its cover. And the catalog’s own words give a late-1970s finish: “All Motobecane bicycle frames are coated with a plastic metalized paint.” None of these gives a single year, but each one moves a bicycle to the correct side of a line.

Let the components narrow it down

The parts are the most reliable clock on a Motobécane and on an American one they come in two kinds. The older and lower models carry French equipment, Normandy and Maillard hubs, Huret and Simplex derailleurs and the rest, several of which carry date stamps. By 1979 most of the American range wore Japanese parts from new: SunTour and Shimano derailleurs, SR and Sugino cranks and Shimano hubs. Those parts are original, not later replacements, and Shimano’s two-letter date code reads straight off them. Both the French and the Japanese codes are explained in How to Date a Vintage Bicycle by Its Components, and the Campagnolo on the two racing models is covered in How to Identify and Date Vintage Campagnolo Components.

Remember that a part dates itself. A date taken from a component is the earliest the bicycle can be in its present form, so look for two or three parts that agree before you trust the answer.

A worked example

Suppose a Grand Record comes in, painted new blue, with a Vitus 172 transfer on the seat tube.

1. The Vitus transfer rules out the Reynolds 531 Grand Record of the early 1970s.
2. Its derailleurs, crank, brakes and hubs are all Shimano 600, the group the 1979 catalog specifies, along with new blue as one of the model’s two colors.
3. The rear hub reads “CK” in Shimano’s code: C for 1978 and K for November. Nothing on the bicycle is newer.

The parts were made late in 1978 and the specification matches the 1979 catalog line for line, so this is a 1979 Grand Record. If its bottom bracket shell also carries a stamp, note what it says, because a reading that agrees with the parts is exactly the evidence the frame-number survey needs.

Record what you find

Motobécane dating will improve only as owners share what their bicycles carry. When you have placed yours, add it to the Ebykr Serial-Number Registry with every stamp, where each one sits, the model and the parts that dated it, and browse the Motobécane documents in the Ebykr Catalog Archive. If you own a Motobécane catalog, a price list or a dealer sheet, even a single page, it becomes a dating tool for everyone once it is in the archive.

The Ebykr Identify and Date series also covers Peugeot, Motobécane’s great French rival, Raleigh, Fuji and Reynolds tubing, with every guide gathered on the Identify and Date hub.

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