PROJECT ORIGIN
Royal Enfield wanted an example of their first ever motorcycle for their heritage collection, so they recreated this one. We take a spin on this ambitious project
This is pure Chitty Chittty Bang Bang. The machineI’m riding around a twisty, but mercifully smooth go-kart track is really just a bicycle with an engine. No suspension, marginal brakes, weird controls and a power unit that’s making alternate popping and wheezing noises. There’s a fair bit of smoke too. I’d been apprehensive about riding this, er... contraption, but it’s really very simple. As long as it’s already running – and you don’t want to stop.
“Don’t bother adjusting anything,” says Gordon May, the bike’s chaperone. ‘It’ll go however fast it wants to. To speed up, start pedalling. To slow down, use the decompressor; on its own, the brake doesn’t really do much.’
The bike has no clutch or gears, just a direct belt drive to the rear wheel from the engine mounted ahead of the handlebars. The carburettor is little more than a petrol-warming device through which air is sucked in the hope that the evaporating fuel will provide a combustible mix. Ignition is by battery and coil, and timing of the spark is adjusted by lever. Lubrication is by hand pump – one squeeze every 8-10 miles. “If it stops smoking, it’s probably ready for another shot,” says Gordon.
So what age is this bizarre machine? A guess at 1901 would be fair, but in fact it was built in 2022. The booming Royal Enfield company wanted to acquire one of their first bikes to add to their heritage collection, but none existed. So they built one. And of the 800,000 bikes that the company made in 2022, this was the hardest to create.
“We started with a period advert that had been Sellotaped back together and two photographs,” explains Gordon, who’s Royal Enfield’s official brand historian. “And one of those was out of focus.” There was misinformation available too. “All the books and literature say that the first bikes had a Minerva engine – but when we showed the pictures to an expert, he told us that it wasn’t a Minerva. It took a while, but we finally worked out that it was a loose copy of a Ducommen, which were made in Alsace around the turn of the century.”
The project to build the bike was an out-of-hours undertaking utilising the passion and skills of the people who work in the company’s tech centres at Bruntingthorpe in Leicestershire and Chennai in India. The first step was to scan the
