Written by Martin Hodgson
Somewhere in those teenage years most of us, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, are bundled into a careers advisors office and asked what we want to do with the rest of our lives. Given a whole ten minutes, if you’re lucky, you’re soon agreeing to a job you didn’t even know existed. Now leaving dazed and confused many stumble on this path forever; but not Madrid’s Antonio Schefle. At 40 he packed it all in to follow his dream of building custom bikes. Each a unique expression of his client’s deepest desires, like his latest BMW R65 ‘Invader’, purpose fit to monster any type of road.
In the beautiful country air just outside the Spanish city of Madrid, Antonio setup 72 Cycles Performance in 2012 to pursue his passion. But for him, it’s not just the name of a company or a workshop that builds bikes. It represents his own personal brand of artistic interpretation of the customers ultimate custom craving and then bringing each to life in mechanical form.
From the start the ‘Invader’ build had a very clear direction; to utilise a classic and beloved bike, but to fit it out with only the very best components so it was genuinely fast on the unsealed mountain roads. For this reason the BMW R65 made perfect sense, bulletproof with that BMW dependability, capable of being made to look beautiful and a proven performer on and off road when treated to the right go-fast pieces.
The right donor bike was found...