A crowd of weekend toursits on the Santa Monica Pier stared curiously into the rolling fog last Saturday looking for the source of a loudening motor buzz.

Then they came - as if a time portal leading from 1960's London had opened up on the other side of the mist: two dozen smiling 'mods' atop Italian motor scooters.

When the scooter riders reached the merry-go-round they slowed down just enough so a few could wink at the crowd, before accelerating en masse back up the pier, then onto Pacific Coast Highway and into the Malibu canyons.

"It's fun to ride in a pack," explained Kaspar Abbo, 34, a member of the new Westside Scooter Club. "People look at you like you're crazy. Or they look at teh scooter like it's a little toy and they want one."

A tough but self-deprecating attitude is the rule of the ride. And you can't join unless you have a two-stroke Vespa or Lambretta motor scooter, but that's the only membership requirement.

After spotting a flier, Abbo, who plays in a Ska band, dusted off and repaired his scooter after not riding it for 15 years.

"First you like it's style," explained Aggo of his love of scooters. "Then you get inot the engineering."

The new Westside Scooter Club started a few months ago when Santa Monica resident and construction worker Andy Parker, 38, rode his 1979 P-200 Vespa motor scooter into a Chevron station in Santa Monica.

"That's when my friend Marvyn who I hand't met yet, pulled in," he explained.

The two had so much fun riding around the Westside that Parker and Marvyn Mack, 30, started the Westside Scooter Club by putting fliers up all over the Westside.

"Then they just came out of the woodwork," Mack said.

Now each Saturday roughly two dozen Italian scooter riding mods show up at the Tommy's burger stand at Pico and Lincoln boulevards at 1 p.m. Some weeks the riders go down to the South Bay, or up the Malibu coast or through Venice, Santa Monica and West Los Angeles.

"This is my crew," said Jerry Miller, 39, Westside Scooter Club member and lead singer of the band the Untouchables, whose new album "Ghetto Stout" comes out today.

Miller drove himself into modern scooter lore by playing himself in the early 80's movie "Repo Man."

"This was out main mode of transportation," said Miller while gaizing affectionately at a 1964 Lambretta LA 150 Special with a huge antennae and a leopard skin seat in the parking lot in front of Tommy's. "My piston had a hole in it, but there was no scarring or damage, thank God. I just finally got around to fixing it."

And perhaps scooters have another appearl in this time of rising gas prices.

"I just filled up my tank for the week with the most expensive type of gas," Parker said. "It cost me $2."