Genesis of A Genius

GENESIS OF A GENIUS

THINKING ON FAST-FORWARD

THE FIRST QUESTION HAS TO BE THIS ONE: WHY? It's a question John Britten himself struggles to answer. It's a case of fooling about in the workshop and getting seriously out of control. What started as a burning desire to build his own racebike has snowballed into a small, enthusiastic company employing 13 staffers.

Britten started the ball rolling in 1986 by restyling his bevel-drive Ducati racer with bodywork of his own design. The long Ducati chassis and hopelessly unreliable (it ate crank after crank) motor soon persuaded him to look elsewhere for an engine and a chassis. A Denco motor (New Zealand-built, air-cooled VTwin, designed for speedway sidecars) in a homespun frame followed the season after. The motor proved the weak link as it was designed for low-revving torque and short blasts.

After much fiddling and rebuilding of the Denco motor, Britten decided to design his own engine. He did his own drawings, made his own patterns and set to work. The rest, as they say, is history.

Now Britten Motorcycles is a professional, forward-thinking engineering company currently involved in several design consultancy projects it wouldn’t care to see in print, at least not at this early stage. Its premises and remote New Zealand location provide the ideal top-secret environment for such work. Britten’s technicians are pioneering new carbon-fiber lay-up techniques for their wheels and plans are afoot for a new motor which bristles with interesting and unusual methods of construction.

As the V-1000 testified, John Britten’s ideas are fresh and original. Speak to any of Britten’s employees and they’ll tell you the ideas don’t all work-but 90 percent of them do, which makes them all worth trying. For this reason, big-time bike-makers have kept a keen eye on Britten’s experiments. Does it occur to you, as it has to others, that what Britten and his team have managed to do with wishbone front suspension puts things like the Bimota Tesi, the Yamaha GTS and the BMW Telelever to shame?

It’s unlikely there’ll be a road version of the V-1000, sad as that may be. The low-volume production run would make it uneconomical. And, as important, the workforce isn’t interested-the staff likes going racing and building pure racebikes. It’s the only place to really test new and exciting ideas. —Mark Forsyth