special brew YOUR BIKES, YOUR WAY
33 years ago Simon Martin built an ultra-compact, mega-minimal, multi-adjustable single-cylinder racer. Now it’s back as a superlight road bike
Simon Martin has been a member of that exclusive club since the mid 1980s, when he landed a job with legendary frame builders Harris Performance. It was the ideal nursery for a fledgling motorcycle constructor, and within two years he had built his first custom-framed special, based on a Honda CBX750.
Although the CBX was wondrously light and compact, and beautifully crafted, Simon regarded it as a mere warm-up for the next project – the bike you see here. “I decided to build a bike that was fully adjustable because I wanted to learn how to make chassis, and find out what all the bits and pieces did.
“I’d bought an XBR500 which I’d raced for a bit – not particularly successfully – so I decided to build a chassis for that. Single cylinder racing was taking off at the time, with a national series. And the engines were affordable.”
Simon and I had met in 1983, when we were studying for a motorcycle engineering diploma at Merton College in London. After we qualified, he started building bikes and I started writing about them in Performance Bikes. So when the Supermono project began in 1989, we featured it in the magazine. Simon’s first instalment, written under the pseudonym Enid Puceflange, kicked off with a poem:
Varoombah, varoombah, biker man Build me a bike as fast as you can Whack it and weld it and mark it with style
So’s I may pose about like a highway chile. That highway reference didn’t make immediate sense, because the XBR-engined bike was a pure racer. Simon had a few outings (“I wasn’t very good”), then hit on the idea of getting someone really quick to ride it. First that was Mick Smith, then occasional PB tester Steve Marlow. “Steve eventually became European Supermono champion, although not on this bike. He used to blow the engine quite regularly. Eventually it threw a rod, and that was the end of it.”
