The Baldet Dealer Specials that are now so sought after and cherished came about purely by chance after Andre visited the Douglas factory in Kingswood, Bristol in 1957. He noticed six Vespa Continental 150cc models that had recently been imported from Piaggio and purchased all of them. One of them had suffered some damage to the original white paintwork, so once the machines were at his Northampton dealership, he asked his own painter to do a quick repair job on it using some black paint that the company used for painting bicycles.
Pleased with the result, he then painted the rest of the Continentals in a range of different colours and added the now famous Arc-en-Ciel badge, meaning ‘rainbow’ in French, to the legshields.
From The Mountain
From then on
