Vintage Triumphs, cold beer, hot pizza and good vibes in Costa Mesa, California.
By early evening, the lot outside its Costa Mesa workshop was filled with old Triumphs, unusual builds and the people who keep them alive.
The OG2 tried to keep us home. A dead battery delayed our departure, but some things are worth finding another way to get to.
Tucked into an unassuming warehouse in Costa Mesa, Le Hangar 23 is dedicated to keeping vintage Triumphs where they belong: out of garages, off display stands, and on the road. The shop fixes them, builds them, and races them in the desert. It also produces its own line of workwear, designed to fit naturally alongside the motorcycles and the people who ride them.
The name reaches back much further than the shop itself.
Owner Elliott Delapré spent his childhood summers on his grandfather’s farm in France, where two enormous airplane hangars were packed with welders, tractors, bicycles, scrap metal and just about anything else a mechanically curious kid could get his hands on. It was there that his grandfather taught him how to weld, take things apart and, perhaps more importantly, put them back together.
At thirteen, Elliott cobbled together his first motorcycle using scrap metal and an engine pulled from a discarded pressure washer. The welds broke before he made it off the block.
Naturally, he was hooked.
Mopeds and beat-up Hondas eventually gave way to vintage Triumphs. After spending years working under veteran mechanic Tink at a restoration shop in Costa Mesa, Elliott took over the space and transformed it into what is now Le Hangar 23.
That history is visible everywhere you look. The shop is filled with polished classics, desert-weathered survivors, unfinished projects and beautifully strange machines that blur the line between restoration and reinvention. At the open house, bikes occupied the lifts, spilled onto the pavement and became temporary seating for anyone curious enough to throw a leg over.
It didn’t feel like a showroom, and that’s the point.
Le Hangar 23 believes an old motorcycle being ridden by someone who loves it is worth more than a hundred pristine restorations collecting dust. Judging by the oil-stained engines, knobby tires and smiling faces filling the lot, plenty of people in Costa Mesa agree.
Dead battery and all, we’re glad we made it.
