Britten Motorcycles Precursor V1000
In 1988, John Britten’s first bike was the Aero D One which had similarities with the Aero D One bike belonging to his friend Mike Brosnan, a machine with John’s fingerprints here and there.
Aero D One had a “Denco” air-cooled speedway engine made by his friend Bob Denson, this bike having a couple of drawbacks though. Air cooling led to some problems with speedway engine torque being one of them. The Denco bike complained about this new road racing environment and soon broke a gudgeon pin in protest. It was then that the seed of something new and revolutionary was sewn, that being for John to make the entire motorcycle himself. It meant a new engine.
With a little help from his friends, wooden mock ups were made for castings. The cylinder head being made of thin layers of balsa wood, carefully over laid to create the perfect shape of the inlet port, the source of horsepower. John, the revolutionary thinker, decided not have a chassis; everything would bolt to a strong engine of 60 degrees in the vee angle. Fuel injection, water cooling, narrow valve angles….the list was endless.
Now, NZ Classic Motorcycles has the first ever Britten. Gary Goodfellow, the ex-pat Kiwi based in Canada agreed to ride it at Daytona in March 1989. It ran very strong in practice and on the start line it out accelerated everything only to have fuel injector problems early in the race. Back in New Zealand, more development followed and of course in typical style, John made another one the same. Back to Daytona in 1990 with Gary and the fastest guy in NZ at the time, Robert Holden, where both bikes finished in the top ten.
In 1991 the Canadian rider Steve Crevier, and Paul Lewis an Australian jockey known as the “angry ant”, contested the event in Florida’s famous circuit near Daytona Beach. Paul ran the Britten into second place. At last the work was beginning to pay off. Reliability had arrived, just top speed was missing.
Those first two bikes were now developed and, by the way, were not slugs. Gary Goodfellow ran it in Canada with success and really liked the bike. Even the manufacturers such as Fritz Egli and the guys at Bimota who were depending on outsourced engines, were asking John nice questions about a supply program for his fast and powerful motors so they could build their own bikes for re-sale. The only big problem was going to be the fitting of a starter motor for street use.
John Britten had more or less two choices: either sell his engines as an income provider, or go it alone and just make race bikes for his own interest. Trouble was though….on the warm down lap at Daytona, Doug Polen the winner, pulled a giant wheelie past Paul on the second -laced Britten. “Ha ha ha,” your bike is not fast enough! The message was not in words, but his actions in that wheelie.
That was the decider for John Britten. The two bikes were parked up. Back into the workshop and start again with a fresh piece of paper. What to draw was now entrenched in his fertile mind. Same engine, same concept, but this time faster, much faster. Wow, what a bike, even the pink and blue colour scheme. Must have been with great pleasure that Andrew Stroud in 1992 drew up beside the leading bike in the race, then pull a giant wheelie. This time at full racing speed not on a slow down lap. Here I am, this is a Britten, we are from “down under” and we came up here to roll you over! Ha ha ha, your bike is not fast enough. The Pre-Curser Britten you see here today, did its job. It is a real piece of the Britten history, in fact it’s the biggest clue in the puzzle.
Performance
The Britten bikes hold many world speed records, and race wins against the world’s most successful factory teams speaks volumes. But it was the ferocious way it dominated that made it such a spectacular performer. Legendary TT champion Joey Dunlop rode the bike and said, “It’s very powerful”, “does too many wheelies”. You can see this for yourself in the videos below, as the riders struggle to keep the combination of massive torque and light weight… from hoisting the front wheel, even when passing the world’s fastest Ducatis going as fast as they could. It’s an incredibly impressive bike on all fronts.