Where most of us just moan about something not being right,
John Britten actually did something about it
Readers of this blog should be no strangers to John Britten
and the bike he created, the Britten V1000. Thing is, however, it is a story
that you just can’t ever get tired of and it only seems all the more amazing
with the re-telling.
From his backyard in Christchurch, John Britten - design
genius, engineer, artist, thinker, entrepreneur, inventor, architect, builder,
glider pilot and sculptor - combined design and engineering to stand the world
of motorcycle racing on its head. His motorcycle has been variously described
as state-of-the-art, novel, avant-garde, revolutionary, exotic, innovative,
unique and an organic thing of beauty. The fact that it was the work of one man
and a few friends is just the icing on the cake.
Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1950, he immediately
displayed a passion for mechanical things. Together with a friend, he built
go-karts out of disused packing cases and by the age of 12 he had fitted a
petrol motor to one, after stripping and rebuilding it to see how it worked.
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| The first incarnation of the Britten |
By the time he was thirteen, he and his friend had unearthed
and restored an Indian Scout. By the age of 26 and with a mechanical
engineering qualification under his belt, along with jobs in New Zealand and
the UK, he packed it all in, built himself a couple of glass kilns and went
into business as a fine artist, designing and hand-making glass lighting.
At the same time he restored an old stable block into a home
for him and his wife using material reclaimed from old buildings. Not being
able to find light fittings or door handles that satisfied him, he designed and
made his own.
His passion for motorcycling never left him and, in 1986, he
started to modify his Ducati bevel-drive race bike by creating his own
bodywork. But the rest of the bike was hopelessly unreliable. He then set to
work and made his own frame into which he slotted a New Zealand made Denco
engine. Yet again the engine was not up to the job so there was really only one
option open to a man like Britten.
He would build a bike from scratch; not just the frame; not
just the bodywork, but the whole thing; engine, chassis, wheels, the lot,
buying in components such as brakes and suspension units. And, typical to his philosophy, it would all
be done on a shoestring budget, making it up as he went along.
Being an individual without any constraints whatsoever, he
could begin from first principles. Shaun Craill, writing in Pro-Design
magazine, said; ‘He didn’t understand he was being unconventional because he
hadn’t been taught what conventional design was…’
As Britten stated in a 1993 interview: “I guess I'm simply
free of any constraints. I can take a fresh look at things, unlike a designer
working for, say, the Jaguar company, who is obliged to continue the Jaguar
look.”
Britten and his small band of helpers conceived, designed
and built a 60-degree V-twin engine, casting and machining every component
themselves. There was no frame as such, the engine acting as a stressed member with
a backbone unit across the top to hold the suspension at the front and the seat
at the back. The front suspension was an update of the old girder forks and the
rear Ohlins suspension unit sat vertically at the front of the engine. Forks,
backbone, wheels and bodywork were constructed from carbon fibre in their
workshop. The shape of the bodywork was arrived at by using No.8 fencing wire
and a glue gun to create a male mould.
‘It’s the world’s most advanced motorcycle, and it’s not
from Japan, Germany, Italy or America,’ shouted the cover of American magazine
Cycle World. And it was developed into a winner too.
At the 1990 Battle of the Twins at Daytona in the USA, the
bike finished third. The next year they went one better and stood on the second
step of the podium.
By 1992, Britten realised the bike needed a complete
redesign and at that year’s Battle of the Twins race New Zealand rider Andrew
Stroud burst to the front at the start and toyed with rival Pascal Picotte on a
Ducati for the whole race, clearly having the legs of the Italian.
Heartbreakingly, an electrical fault put the bike out on the penultimate lap
(Britten later said; ‘serves me right for using a Ducati part’), but the ride
had garnered the attention of the motorcycling world.
In 1993, the Britten V1000 won the New Zealand Formula One
title. In 1994 it won the British, European and American (BEARS) race at
Bathurst in Australia and set four FIM World Speed Records in the 1000cc and
under category; the flying mile (302.705 km/h), the standing mile (134.617
km/h), the standing start mile (213.512 km/h), and the standing start kilometre
(186.245 km/h), proving itself as the fastest thing on two wheels in its class.
In 1995 the Britten bike, ridden by Andrew Stroud, stormed
the international circuit, taking 1st place in the BEARS World Championship (an
Italian owned Britten taking 2nd) and devastating the field at the Daytona
World Twins, finishing 43 seconds
ahead of the two Harley super-bikes and the latest model Bimota and Ducati
V-twins. Earlier the Britten team had claimed the New Zealand Superbike
Championship and the New Zealand Grand Prix as well as the New Zealand Battle
of the Streets.
When the Guggenheim Museum staged an exhibition called The
Art of the Motorcycle, the Britten V1000 was one of the exhibits, curator Ultan
Guilfoyle saying; “All this engineering wizardry might have ended up looking
like a techno-geek's nightmare, but Britten's genius was […] about turning his
dream into an organic thing of beauty, as compact and powerful as a coiled
spring…”
Patrick Bodden, describing Britten's designs as the
“privateer's last stand” in an age of generic factory-born superbikes, wrote in
The Interactive Motorcycle:
“It takes someone like John Britten to remind us that
individual thought and passion can still challenge and on occasion, beat the
very best teams of engineers and the orthodoxy in which they have embedded
current motorcycle design. Evolution alone won't sustain such an effort—nothing
short of revolution will do! In designing and building the motorcycle that
bears his name, John pushed his reference materials to the edges of his work
area and began with a blank sheet, an open mind, and a fertile imagination. His
stunningly beautiful and effective creation affirmed for the entire
motorcycling community the intrinsic value of working to build a better bike
and the potential of an individual to make it happen.”
Britten was much more modest about his achievements,
describing himself as a ‘former racer who was never much good; a bit like a
violinist who's no maestro but makes his own Stradivarius.”
John’s death from cancer at the age of 45 robbed the world
of an engineer who could have changed the motorcycle for ever. As it was, he
came close.
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| The Genius himself and his creation |
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