Billy Joel Sells 70-Plus Vintage Motorcycles at New York Auction

Billy Joel will auction more than 70 vintage motorcycles from his personal collection on November 20 and 21 in New York.

Gooding Christie's and Rétromobile New York Auctions will oversee the sale at the Javits Center. A selection of the bikes goes on view at Christie's Rockefeller Center from October 8 through 12.

Joel has collected and restored vintage motorcycles for decades. For 15 years he ran 20th Century Cycles on Long Island, a shop that stored and serviced his bikes and doubled as a free museum for the collection. The shop closed in 2025.

"I've always been drawn to bikes built by people who cared about getting every detail right," Joel said in a statement. "I've loved building this collection. Now it's someone else's turn to hit the road."

The collection spans several decades and includes machines by Ducati, BMW, Harley-Davidson, Triumph, Honda, Kawasaki and Moto Guzzi. Two lots stand out.

The first is a 1982 Ducati 900, built as a replica of the bike British racing driver Mike Hailwood rode to victory at the 1978 Isle of Man TT. Gooding Christie's estimates it at $25,000 to $35,000.

The second is a 1978 Triumph T140 Bonneville, which Madison Square Garden gave Joel after his record-setting 150th sold-out show at the arena. The bike comes with a matching helmet adorned with the dates of every show he played at the venue. Its estimate is $10,000 to $15,000.

Proceeds will support the Joel Foundation, the musician's charity.

Motorcycles have run through Joel's music and imagery for much of his career. He recorded the demo "Motorcycle Song" in 1992, released on the 2005 compilation My Lives, and the "Uptown Girl" video ends with Joel and his future wife, Christie Brinkley, riding off together on a bike. His Glass Houses track "You May Be Right" carries the lines: "Even rode my motorcycle in the rain/And you told me not to drive/But I made it home alive/So you said that only proves that I'm insane."

Two years after that song appeared, in 1982, Joel crashed a motorcycle and severely injured his hand.

"My left wrist got pulled out of the socket and dislocated," Joel told Rolling Stone in 2017. "My left thumb got crushed and I was in the hospital looking at my hand — but I really wasn't all that worried about it because I was never that great a piano player to begin with. I wasn't Vladimir Horowitz. I wasn't a classical musician so my technique really didn't suffer that much."

The November sale effectively disperses a collection Joel spent decades assembling and publicly displayed for free at 20th Century Cycles — and it hands the next generation of collectors the chance, in Joel's words, "to hit the road."