Genius? Madman? John Britten created one of the most amazing motorcycles on the planet and beat the world's biggest manufacturers--All from a tiny country in the southern hemisphere. We called The Britten V1000 "The World's Most Advanced Motorcycle" and it seemed to have come from nowhere. Technical Editor Kevin spent time with John Britten, and Cycle World track tested and raced this motorcycle. Kevin and Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer dive into the legends and mythology around the great Britten motorcycle and the man who led its creation.
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SportsTranscript
00:00 Welcome to the Cycle World podcast. I'm Mark Hoyer, Editor-in-Chief. I'm with Kevin Cameron,
00:04 our Technical Editor. Before we get started today, just a quick shout out for the Cycle World
00:09 merchandise. Get yourself a hat, get yourself a shirt, get yourself the iScare motorcycle special
00:15 edition. It's all either down there in the description or it could be on the side, one of
00:20 the sides in the description. We don't know what Google does. We don't know why, but we got to use
00:25 them. It's a sacred mystery. It is. With the algorithm. But we're here to talk about motorcycles,
00:34 so we'll do it. Get yourself a hat and support the program, support Kevin Cameron's, I don't know,
00:41 TD1 restoration, shall we say. And my terrible habit for burning high octane. This week's episode
00:53 is about the Britton V1000, V1100 and John Britton, the man, because the motorcycle, of course,
01:00 wouldn't exist without the person who made it. This motorcycle predates my career. And oddly,
01:10 no one invited me to ride one at the time because I was busy crashing my RD400, I'm sure of it.
01:19 But we did a few years ago. Nick Einatsch, who's contributed to Cycleworld for a very long time
01:25 and has a long career in riding and racing. And second in the 250 Grand Prix National Championship
01:32 in the AMA. Very accomplished rider and someone who's ridden just about everything.
01:38 And a good driver.
01:40 Yeah, he is. So this is his ride from 2016. "When you pull the trigger on this bike,
01:50 the sounds of heaven crash down to accompany the rapidly advancing blue and pink machine.
01:55 It wants to wheelie out of any second or third gear corner with the slightest suggestion at the
01:59 clip-ons. The harder you push the bike, the better it feels. More speed and tire loads put this bike
02:05 into its element. And I went ahead and tucked in, hung off, pinned the throttle and ran it to red
02:11 line and maximized the brakes. There's a mesmerizing effect this bike has that no other bike can match."
02:18 He talked about the power, about the revs coming up. And
02:24 he said it was a mechanical jet-like symphony, unlike anything he's ever felt, heard or sensed.
02:34 It really did. I reread your piece from Daytona and you described the wheelies in places on the
02:46 track that no other bikes were wheeling. I think it was coming out on the banking or something.
02:51 So you got to meet John Britton and not only just meet him and talk about the excellence of butter or
03:00 cooking or gravy or whatever, it was actually, you really spent some time with him. So let's hear
03:07 about that a little bit, Kevin. Well, I didn't know anything about the man until I got to Daytona
03:14 and found that everyone was talking about him and that he was there. So I went around to the garage
03:22 and in due course was introduced into the presence. And what I found was a person of
03:32 disarming boyish enthusiasm. "I like to work from first principles," he practically put into the
03:40 first sentence that he spoke to me. And what he had just accomplished in making the first of his
03:48 series of unusual motorcycle designs was that he had rejected everything except round wheels
03:56 and had put in their places, the front suspension, the chassis, the engine, the aerodynamics.
04:06 He had put in their places substitutes that worked better than what was then the established
04:15 practice. Now that's quite a font of creative work. And I sort of said, "Well, what I'm seeing
04:28 here suggests that you have never slept in your life." "Oh," he said again, quite enthusiastically,
04:36 "I like to work in periods of five weeks. I sleep four or five hours a night and I'm able to keep
04:45 my train of thought going and then I have to take a rest."
04:49 And let's look at the chassis that he created. He threw away all that tubing and
04:58 beams and all of the convention of the time. And instead he attached to the cylinder heads of the
05:09 V-twin, 60 degree V-twin engine, machined aluminum spools and also to the headstock.
05:20 And then he wrapped carbon fiber roving around these spools, making a triangulated array
05:32 of what I thought of as bones. And once that had been properly wetted out and bound in place and
05:43 what have you, it was sheeted in with flat sheets of carbon Kevlar fabric. And now that I'm saying
05:54 this, it's beginning to sound a lot like Ducati's 2009 Black Pyramid, the carbon fiber chassis that
06:03 was so rigid that Casey Stoner couldn't ride it. But once this chassis was cured, once the carbon
06:18 fiber and the resin holding it all together was cured, it became a sort of skin and bones
06:26 affair. And it was just a little thing, just a little thing.
06:31 Then he decided, "I don't like the cooling system." He rejected that whole thing. "We're
06:37 going to put a radiator in front of the engine where it's in the shadow, the air shadow of the
06:43 front wheel." So he just ran a duct to the back of the motorcycle and put the radiator horizontally
06:50 under the seat. And because the radiator was now receiving full impact pressure,
07:02 whatever Q happened to be as they motored along, the intake for the radiator, instead of being
07:12 like something off a full rigged ship, became a little hole.
07:16 And the fork was a girder fork, again made from carbon fiber. But he said, "I've noticed that the
07:27 alternative front ends that other people are building spook the rider because they behave
07:32 oddly. So I designed mine so it would feel like a telescopic, at least for the first
07:38 couple inches of travel." So from one point to the next, to the next, to the next,
07:44 he had changed everything and he had put in their places something better.
07:52 And this is quite a performance.
07:57 And of course, then the motorcycle began its career, well it already had a career, of
08:07 flattering only to deceive. It did have some stunning success. It showed that it was
08:12 fabulously fast. And that if there had been the equivalent of a factory reliability program,
08:21 like for example, Honda's 2,600-hour product proving cycle, all those little 99-cent failures
08:31 that really bugged poor old John out of his mind would have been trampled to death.
08:38 But I felt an immediate kinship with this man because he, first of all, he's working with
08:48 motorcycles. When you work with motorcycles, you know that you're not trying to make a big
08:54 difference in the human condition. That's been advertised to me all my life is that we must all
09:00 get out there and do something about the human experiment. But all those who have devoted their
09:09 lives to such projects have been desperate persons. It's not an easy task. Maybe it's
09:19 better to focus on something you can understand. And John was able to prove that he could control
09:27 this small piece of reality. And I think that has immense value.
09:33 On the other hand, he didn't do it all himself, even though-
09:37 Well, that's the myth. That's the mythology. The mythology is this genius from New Zealand
09:46 on a shoestring budget came and smashed everyone. But in fact, he far from worked alone. And having
09:55 been to New Zealand, I have friends in New Zealand. I sold a car years ago that was exported
09:59 to New Zealand and the people who bought it tracked me down and asked me about the car.
10:04 And I wrote them a tremendous letter, like a 20,000 word letter on a manual typewriter about
10:10 the history of the car, what I did with it. It was an Austin Healey. And later I went down there to
10:15 visit and drove the car. Really nice people. And as anyone who would be buying an Austin Healey in
10:20 New Zealand, they were gearheads. This guy was a really fantastically clever machinist and you
10:28 name it. He built his own little traction engine that ran off spirits and a flame and it would suck
10:34 it in. And he just did it. He didn't have a design. He just did it. He thought, "Oh, that looks about
10:40 right." And they were cut off for a long, long time. New Zealand was just the bottom of the world
10:46 and they didn't have access. If you wanted to buy a hydraulic jack to jack up your car,
10:51 it was insanely expensive to get it into the country. And so they just learned to work with
10:58 the things they had and old lathes and all that stuff. And so there is this very can-do attitude
11:03 down there and it was easy. Yeah. It was easy and attractive to think of John Britton as a lone
11:14 genius pouring engine cases in his backyard. I mean, that's the story I want to hear. But in fact,
11:23 it was, as with anything, it takes that village of expertise and support in so many ways.
11:31 He had such charm and such confident enthusiasm that it appears that he was able to enslave half
11:43 of the nation. And there were people, but gradually over conversations and talking with
11:52 other people associated with him, I learned that if he couldn't mesmerize people into working for
12:01 him, he'd just pay them. And I relaxed immediately because that's more believable. And then I picked
12:12 up one of those architectural digest type magazines. The magazine costs more than my house.
12:19 And there was John's house that he had built out of an old military stables. Well, of course,
12:28 it looked like the UN and it was clear that one man working weekends did not build this.
12:36 So I realized that there was more to the story and the poor man put everything into these projects,
12:48 into trying to get them before the right public, into trying to interest people in buying 30
12:55 engines, into he had Robert Iannucci trying to persuade Harley Davidson to have a sniff.
13:05 And all of this tremendous effort while trying to make the motorcycle reliable, they had
13:14 a digital engine control that just wouldn't stop stopping. And people worked on it and it seemed,
13:25 oh, there's voltage spikes or, oh, well, there are internal shorts. We think it may be
13:32 humidity inside the case. And what you need for that is a department of, of
13:39 people doing boring and repetitive testing. Sure. And your Nichicon capacitors. Let me tell you,
13:47 you got to get the right capacitors. I'm just saying. Okay. So, uh, those, those boring things
13:57 only got done very gradually as John attracted one after another
14:04 brilliant specialist who could help him. And the last time I spoke with him, we went to lunch
14:16 in Daytona and he said, now when, uh, this motorcycle thing is, is drawing to a close
14:22 now on what I want to work on next is a man powered, um, human powered airplane.
14:28 And he said, I think the people that are trying to do this are doing it all wrong
14:34 because a propeller is a huge waste of, um, propulsive efficiency because it's accelerating
14:41 a small mass of air to a high speed. Can't do that. Said that's why birds have wings instead
14:48 of propellers. So, uh, then I heard that, that he'd lost the rider at the Isle of Man and that
14:58 he was horribly depressed by it. And then I heard that he had a terrible disease. And then I heard
15:03 that he was gone. And the, the people who had been helping him were sure that the, the golden
15:15 excellence of this project would make it live on. It didn't, it became a collector piece and
15:22 there the matter rests. But what this shows is that a person can have a
15:31 set of ideas about a system, a motorcycle in this case, that are
15:40 notably superior to those generally received at the time and further can prove it.
15:47 And that's tremendously encouraging. On the other hand, if we read the Tim Hanna biography,
15:53 we find out that, uh, John had human characteristics. And yes, which causes,
16:02 causes us to say, let him without who is without sin cast the first stone. Yeah. Because
16:10 well, one, one of the people that I met in the circle around John Britton said,
16:16 Oh, wouldn't it be wonderful if someone like John could be involved with MotoGP? And I said,
16:24 I'm afraid John would find MotoGP a prison and a bore because the equipment would have to be ready
16:35 for first practice. No, no questions asked. It would have to be in perfect condition.
16:41 There would have to be team discipline and there would be no room for, for suddenly deciding to
16:49 try a new idea because racing is incrementalism. We're going to make small bets that have some
16:58 possibility of moving us toward the goal of higher performance, but we're not going to put on an
17:03 alternative front end. We're not going to make a skin and bones chassis, and we're not going to put
17:07 the radiator underneath the rider. Well, as you said, a hundred percent doesn't make the grid
17:12 and certainly 110%. And I don't mean that in the traditional sense, but 110% would never make the
17:20 grid, right? It just, you know, you have to, uh, I mean, I think, you know, I think about that Moto
17:25 CIS project with the 15 degree V that Michael CIS was making and his variable trail and alternative
17:34 front end. And it's sort of like rotating crankshafts. Yeah. I mean, you know, some very
17:39 interesting ideas there, but you know, is that, is that actually what's needed or wanted or
17:50 successful in racing? Probably not. You know? Um, I thought about, I thought, you know, as you were
17:57 describing all of this, like what all of John Britain's accomplishments, what would that look
18:03 like, you know, with a support system in MotoGP or why, why if these ideas were superior, why don't
18:14 MotoGP bikes look like Britain's, you know? So, um, I'd like to get into some of the technical
18:23 detail. Um, you know, you talked about the cooling system and you know, what we're accustomed to
18:28 seeing is a huge radiator often curved going down, filling every possible, uh, area, almost
18:37 the whole front of the fairing. Yeah. Whole front of the fairing behind the wheel and now behind,
18:43 uh, strakes, winglets, donut holes, et cetera, all that stuff. Um, and Britain put a hole in the
18:52 fairing at the high pressure point and ran a duct straight through basically to the radiator.
18:59 And that was the pressure side of the radiator. And then he ducted it out
19:04 into the great big hole that the motorcycle was punching, creating negative pressure,
19:11 fill the vacuum, filling the vacuum with this high pressure, he did now air coming out the
19:17 tailpipe, so to speak from under the rider and making some contribution, certainly a, uh,
19:25 an, a great arrow contribution because everything that was, everything that couldn't be made
19:31 exceptionally skinny was basically stuck into the pill, like the torpedo. I think,
19:38 what did you describe it as a torpedo on top of a knife or something like that? Yeah. Torpedo on top
19:43 of a knife. And so this, and that was one of the great things about it is the frontal area
19:47 was incredibly small. And then the pieces of the frontal area were being put to use
19:52 like high pressure to get into the cooling system and to make a smaller radiator work and then
20:00 reducing arrow. And so, yeah, John took his motorcycles to a 20 mile straight piece of
20:09 road in the part of New Zealand where the local authorities could be persuaded to close the road
20:14 for an hour. Pretty nice. Like Bonneville in your backyard. So, uh, that's where he decided that the
20:25 lower fairing was making his bike slower, not faster. And so he did away with the lower fairing.
20:32 And then he decided that it was valuable to have high velocity air passing between the rider's
20:40 lower riders, calves and the engine. And he said, basically, my view is that a motorcycle
20:50 is such a disturbance that trying to streamline it without having the tail, airplanes have a tail,
21:01 fish have a tail, all that tail is like a tapered bar of wet soap. If you squeeze that, if your hand
21:09 is air pressure and you squeeze that, it's going to produce thrust. Well, if you can't have a tail
21:17 on a motorcycle, well, then the fastest fish are the long fish, right? How long can we make
21:21 the motorcycle? Right. So that's right. There are limits. And, uh, I mean, Eric Buell isn't wrong
21:28 to say my favorite wheelbase is 54 inches. Ago Agostini's favorite wheelbase was 53 and a half.
21:40 So, uh, all the fine, such refined tastes, you know, John concluded that he should hammer
21:50 frontal area. He should just try to get rid of as much frontal area as possible
21:54 because the motorcycle was not going to end up with a good, um, aerodynamic coefficient.
22:00 And what an aerodynamic coefficient is says in comparison with a piece of plywood being crammed
22:10 flat on through the air, having the same, Oh, you mean a, a road glide?
22:16 Or those BMWs that have a kitchenette in front of the rider. It's wonderful. But, uh, his view was
22:30 that since you can't clean it up very much, that you should just make it as small as possible.
22:36 And of course, feet twin in line four, uh, in line six, no way. Uh, but of course,
22:47 Honda six of 1967 and 68 was 12.4 inches. The crankshaft was just a little narrow thing.
22:57 So, uh, that was, that was John's deal with, with aerodynamics and it's a, it's a hard argument
23:08 to refute. So, uh, he went from one area. Finally, he decided he didn't like metal
23:19 wheels, metal wheels. Didn't make any sense to him. He said, when you've worked with the
23:24 two directional materials, you begin to develop a distrust of metals. Metals seem like really
23:33 tightly packed sand. And of course, what he was referring to is polycrystalline metals
23:39 and all the weaknesses in the spaces between the crystal grains, the inner granular zone.
23:50 And if you, if you use a directional material that is basically a crystal,
23:55 there's no inner granular zone. The same thing was done in the aviation industry when they found that
24:01 all their problems with turbine blades, failures of various kinds, erosion, blah, blah, blah,
24:08 all the boring stuff that John wouldn't want, wouldn't have wanted to deal with,
24:12 uh, had to do with the inner granular zone. So let's get it out of here.
24:19 So they made single crystal turbine blades. That was a John Britton-like leap.
24:24 So, uh, he, he said, when I'm, when I'm building a shape like the, the gas tank or the
24:34 frontal fairing or what have you, he said, I, I use soft aluminum wire and a glue gun
24:42 to stick it together. And then I sheet it over with urethane. And then he said,
24:48 I sand it and make a mold. And when he says all this, it makes it seem like
24:53 it's going to take 22 minutes. And yet, if you've ever done any of these kinds of things, you know,
25:02 that's not the case. So you've got to have those volunteers who, yes, it's four in the morning,
25:10 but we're all cheerful, aren't we? And we're going to get it done.
25:16 So, um, one of the, one of the wonderful scenes that I remember from the first time that I met
25:26 John was that here came the late Homer Knapp. Homer Knapp had a machine shop that was like,
25:31 um, Kenny Augustine shop. There was just room to walk between the various tools.
25:38 Homer was a superstar. He really was an LA institution.
25:43 There, young guys that were trying to race a Honda Ascot engine, whose crankshaft
25:49 persistently turned into a two piece. They go to Homer and Homer says, well, there's these
25:56 three different options that you could choose. And young guys, I've got the money.
26:01 Do you have the time? And so he did these off the wall things. So Homer and John Britton took
26:11 turns pulling interesting stuff out of their pockets and discussing them together. John had a
26:18 DFV connecting rod from a Cosworth Formula One engine. And he said, when I thought, well,
26:26 what rod ratio shall I give my engine? I looked at this 1.8. Well, that's good enough. All right.
26:32 That's decided. And Homer had all sorts of stuff in his pockets. And it just went on like this.
26:39 It was these people you see have no one to talk to. They go home to the family. They're not going
26:50 to be able to talk about horizontal ducted radiators. So John and Homer just had a ball.
27:02 And lest you should think that John was just another kind of shop machine,
27:12 there he was working away in his garage and there came a loud yell. And it was,
27:21 I think, Gary Goodfellow's baby was in a bassinet by the door and the sun had swung around so that
27:28 it was right in the baby's face. John saw immediately what was going on and he went
27:34 and moved the baby into the shade. So he had a theory of mind.
27:41 If I were that baby, I would be yelling too. And so these episodes of
27:58 enthusiastic innovation contrast with the difficulty of keeping a group of people together
28:07 on a common task on a volunteer or near volunteer basis.
28:14 And when it comes to shoestrings, it's a hell of a shoestring that could bring the size
28:22 crew and the air freight that he had in Daytona all the way from New Zealand. So
28:29 it became clear that his family had money and that he was a
28:37 financially able person. But that does not detract from the fluid ease with which
28:51 novel and workable ideas poured forth. Because I've known a lot of the guys who
28:57 basically tried to stay up for the rest of their life building a project bike filled with their
29:05 own ideas and they imagined they were going to ride it to glorious victory.
29:10 And nothing happened because they ran out of money, because the wife left,
29:17 because the rent on the workspace wasn't forthcoming. These people made incredible
29:26 sacrifice of their personal lives for their projects. But in general, the projects failed
29:34 to produce anything. Whereas again and again, the Britain motorcycles would streak into the lead
29:42 and there were some wins, but there were a lot of DNFs, a lot of really depressing DNFs.
29:51 So as an MO for creating the future, no corporation would touch this,
30:01 but John made it clear that it was a possible way to go.
30:08 Yeah. I find what you said interesting about the connecting rod thought of saying like,
30:15 well, I have this DFV connecting rod and it's 1.8 ratio and away we go. And I think,
30:22 I always find that fascinating. I'm not an engineer, I'm a mechanic and I like working
30:31 on things and I like, you know, I mean, I've gone pretty deep on some projects,
30:36 but you have to choose your battles and figuring out connecting rod ratio is something that someone
30:43 else has spent a billion hours working on such as Cosworth. And why not pick that one like the
30:50 ripe fruit that it is and focus on the other things that you think you can have an impact on.
30:56 Still, his engine ran great. And I'm curious as to what you think the difference was between the
31:03 Britain V1000 and some of the other bikes of the period and what Nick Einatch described as
31:09 pulling in a way and having power that he hasn't experienced really. And I think,
31:16 certainly there was the lightness factor, right? The bike was exceptionally light,
31:20 but what is it about that powertrain design that cylinder, I guess, cylinder heads are really,
31:27 but bore and stroke are important.
31:29 Well, I think what was going on at that time was that the V-twin revolution was
31:36 just little green spikes coming up in the garden and the Ducati's 851 had
31:44 overcome opposition from Dr. Taglioni. He didn't like four valves.
31:53 There were a lot of things that he didn't like and Massimo Bordi, the young upstart,
32:01 was able to prevail because the 851 was the first Ducati that ever produced 100 horsepower.
32:09 First ever. And it was clearly going places. And because the Ducati was
32:21 moving forward in this way and the formula said, you can have a 750cc four-cylinder
32:26 or a 1000cc twin, any kind of twin you like. And I think that
32:34 no one had really done the numbers to see whether a twin that turned modern RPM
32:45 could compete with a 750 in line four. And John did. And Eraldo Ferracci did.
32:54 I mean, he was the man behind the 888 and made it win races.
33:00 What a legend.
33:02 And he's still himself.
33:10 He hasn't retreated behind some corporate... He isn't disappearing into an immense Audi
33:16 chauffeur-driven car. But I think at that time that the V-twin as an alternative to the inline
33:29 four was... John Britton was exploring it. Massimo Bordi was exploring it. There may have been others.
33:38 But things were happening so fast that it was breathtaking. And I think that's what
33:45 knocked people over. The V-twin, John realized that you couldn't just build a top-end motor.
33:56 And so he was aware that the part of the intake port that just upstream from the valve had to
34:05 be small enough so that that air was moving at a speed so high that when the piston began to rise
34:12 on compression, but the intake valves were still open, that that air would just keep rushing in
34:20 there. And finally, the air would stop and say, "Was I doing something?" And then the valves
34:27 would close and the cylinder would be filled with mixture. So I think it had some mid-range
34:37 because he was conscious of that. They have Daytona only in Daytona, but in New Zealand
34:47 and Australia, the racetracks have curves, some of them to the right. So it's... I think that
34:57 the phenomenon of the Britain had to do with what a surprise it was for a twin to be doing things
35:02 that inline fours couldn't do. So, very intoxicating time.
35:13 Yeah. I mean, Nick raced against big four cylinders and it had the measure of those bikes.
35:22 Absolutely did. You talked about the building up the way John Britain built up the cylinder head.
35:30 Oh, he was so pleased with that.
35:33 Well, I mean, why wouldn't you be? And it's just so practical and so doable.
35:41 He took a block of plexiglass and he machined the combustion chamber and the valve seats,
35:49 and then he put pieces of aluminum tubing where the bolts would go to retain the head and all of
35:56 the services. And then he said, "All right, the intake ports will have to go in this space that's
36:03 left." And he built up the intake ports by ring by ring. And at each step, he would try to optimize
36:14 the flow. And he said of this method, "I'm really rather chuffed about this." Who couldn't be charmed
36:23 by that? And then of course, that offhanded thing that he said to me, "When this motorcycle thing is
36:33 over with, I plan to devote myself to human powered aircraft." It was like, "Okay, that's boring now.
36:43 I'll do something else." And that's what Robin Tulloway said about Formula One. He said that
36:50 he'd lost interest in it. And this was a local madman in Minneapolis building weird specials
37:03 with snowmobile engines. And because he was working for MTS, who were frequent hosts to
37:12 Formula One teams who wanted to put their cars on their seven post shakers, the Renault people said,
37:19 "Who's this guy here? He seems to know, well, really a lot." And so he was whisked away to
37:31 the Formula One zone in England and was there ever since. Then he was what, chief scientist
37:36 at Mercedes Formula One. So these characters- He was just a dude that loved motorcycles.
37:43 It takes a lot to entertain them. He just loved motorcycles. The special that
37:50 you mentioned was the Toularis, which was a Polaris snowmobile engine, two stroke, 800-ish.
37:58 Yeah. And stuck into his own chassis and my what a beast it was. We have a beautiful feature on it
38:06 from the day. Just gorgeous photos and parallel twin, right? Yeah. Yeah. Parallel twin.
38:14 And he went on from just wanting to do this and he was a vibration and frequency guy.
38:24 And they were looking at all the things that you don't think about this, like, "Oh, my bike
38:30 vibrates." And like, "What can I do? I'll stick some lead shot in the handlebars or a little
38:34 bit of arsenic through." And we just think of it this way. And when you get somebody who goes to,
38:39 what'd you call them? What kind of principles? First. First principles. Chatter on the fork,
38:48 any damping, any cycling, any vibration, it all has a frequency. And that's kind of where Robin
38:54 really put his head. And that's why they were using the shaker table. And what could they do
39:00 with suspension that would smooth the passage of the vehicle down the road and increase the grip
39:06 and all the things. And he made a really great career out of it. He showed me. I visited
39:16 MTS once and he showed me a motorcycle on a two-post shaker. And he said, "Let's make a
39:24 frequency sweep." And as he did so, the shift pedal disappeared. And then it reappeared as the
39:35 frequency rose past its frequency and the luggage carrier or some other thing began to disappear.
39:42 And finally, it was the front end that was whipping forwards and back at about, what would
39:47 it be? 20, 22 cycles or something. And it just gives you a completely different view of what a
39:56 motorcycle is. And that is why in so many cases, the engineers refer to certain parts by their
40:03 frequency and not by their proper name. And this also caused the Ducati people to refer to the
40:13 Diavel engine as the 11 degree because race engines have this huge valve overlap where both
40:20 the intakes and exhausts are open together for a brief period around top dead center.
40:26 But in order to pass the emissions, you had to close up that overlap. And
40:32 preserving performance while doing away with overlap is what's given us this modern,
40:39 I like to call it a Euro 5 power band. It's just flat.
40:44 Yeah. Was it not Gordon Jennings who tape led to his carburetors?
40:50 Oh, absolutely. We've all done that. We've all done that.
40:53 Carburetors vibrating so much, it stops fueling properly.
40:57 Turning the fuel into froth. Yeah.
40:59 And it doesn't come out the jets right. And if you're racing a two-stroke, that can have
41:03 disastrous consequences, any bike really, but it's worse than the two-stroke.
41:07 Yep. And that's a thing you fight with all the time on almost anything you do is those vibrations.
41:14 Robin Tullow would be a great show. No question.
41:23 Well, John Britton, of course, perished from the earth in 1995. And
41:31 I was so sorry when Peter Williams had his accident and sort of disappeared from public
41:41 affairs because I had a conversation with Peter at Daytona that had the same excitement and sense of
41:49 having met a wonderful source of all the things that I consider good. And it just seemed like
41:59 a crime that he was just, you know, the old hook comes out around the neck and he's pulled off
42:07 stage. Yep.
42:08 So, because Peter had one idea after another, and they were ideas that could be implemented
42:16 using a Norton parallel twin to push the result along the road. And these ideas worked.
42:24 Yeah. What do you think unites that?
42:28 It's just, is it a manner of thinking? I mean, you have to have a base curiosity,
42:35 but there's also, there's more to it. Well, John and I discussed this and I said to him at one
42:42 point, I always find it curious that there is an aesthetic of circuit board design. There are
42:52 things you don't do because we circuit board designers don't do that. That shows mental
42:58 weakness. There are obviously mathematicians have an aesthetic and it usually has to do with this.
43:06 Especially early coders, you know, people who are writing programming for chips that had virtually
43:11 no memory. You had to be elegant and really efficient with that. And now it's just like all
43:18 these overlays and wizards and you click and it's just all this, we have so much extra storage and
43:24 Object oriented programming. Yeah.
43:26 Just like blah, just like a vomit of code.
43:29 We'll crush it with zeros and ones.
43:31 Tell you as a guy who runs a website, we will not crush it with zeros and ones. It's such a
43:36 pain in the ass. Everything, all the coding getting laid over, over years. You're like,
43:40 why is this breaking? We don't know why. And things just disappear or God, it's just-
43:45 Well, that was where digital flight control came from because they had so many, such a pile of
43:51 band-aids built to control the airplane. Finally, the band-aids fell over. Their interactions with
43:57 each other, like being on 26 drugs. Anyway, what John said about the separate aesthetics of
44:05 different fields of human endeavor, he said, "I think that if we could know enough, we would know
44:12 that there's only one aesthetic and it has application of special nature to each area."
44:21 You just described religion.
44:22 I mean, it is. It's one aesthetic. Usually it's one. We focus on-
44:30 The perfection of God, yes, and of his eternal plan, which it would be lovely to be able to
44:38 leave it to an entity like that, but we seem to have some responsibility of our own. It's
44:44 full-time job. Well, I got to, that Ducati's got to carry me home. I want it to run right.
44:49 You sure do. But I-
44:51 I still have my eyes on some smaller goals than eternity, I think.
44:55 Yes. I love that. If we could know enough, I suspect there's only one aesthetic.
45:02 No, it's beautiful.
45:03 And it has to do with getting to the heart of things, to the effective minimum statement
45:12 of whatever it is. The thing that the circuit board people don't want is jumpers.
45:19 If you've thought it right, if you've located the components properly, you can wire it on the board.
45:27 If you have to use jumpers, it just shows you're weak-minded.
45:31 And of course, there are projects where there's people saying, "Oh, we need another six weeks of
45:38 troubleshooting." Meanwhile, they're thundering on the door, "Ship it. We got to ship this."
45:46 And so we don't get to know what that single aesthetic is.
45:51 But I was delighted to find that John had time for that.
45:58 Well, as you say, tragedy gone too soon. We didn't get to see the ornithopter.
46:08 True.
46:10 The flying bird powered by a person.
46:14 I was just thinking the other night that there are so many birds
46:17 who, which when they're on takeoff power, their wingtips touch above the body and below the body.
46:25 So they're just reciprocating propeller blades, which are also producing lift. It's brilliant.
46:32 Yeah.
46:34 And it only took four billion years.
46:40 Right. So, well, I really appreciate you sharing the things that you know, and I'm
46:46 glad that we could talk about somebody like John Britton. And of course, he was human. And of course,
46:52 there were many different angles that all would come together. And almost any time you put
46:57 someone's name on the motorcycle, your own, there has to be a driving force. Eric Buell,
47:04 definitely a driving force.
47:05 Definitely a driving force, yes.
47:08 Harley and the Davidsons. I mean, you know, if your name's on the motorcycle,
47:12 imagine what it would have been to be around at that time in the shed.
47:15 Yes.
47:17 That does not happen because we should go get a beer and a bratwurst, right?
47:21 Yeah.
47:21 Because that's not the first thing on our mind. And so...
47:24 No, we've got to finish this.
47:26 Yeah. The remarkable spirit. And then the, you know, for Britton, seeing his remarkable spirit
47:34 and ability to charm people and all that expressed into such an elegant and effective tool,
47:42 it had its flaws for sure. But, you know, what if you could be...
47:45 It could have been dealt with if there had been that kind of facility behind him.
47:52 But I think that he did fabulously with the bare minimum. And they were very good at trying to
48:03 snatch success from the jaws of failure. As for example, trying to braze
48:09 a cast iron cylinder liner just sitting out in the open air. No preheating muff, no nothing.
48:18 What we had to do, we had to do it, would be their response. So they did do it.
48:24 And necessity is a tremendous motivation.
48:32 So I think they put themselves on this construct of their collective mind,
48:39 which was to make this motorcycle successful. And they couldn't allow it to fail.
48:44 And of course it did fail. It never went into production. They didn't sell 30 engines.
48:52 They didn't sell dozens of bikes. But it wasn't for want of trying.
48:59 I mean, when you say it failed, it failed commercially.
49:03 Yes.
49:03 But dynamically, it did not fail.
49:06 That's an expression of human activity. It was a brilliant success.
49:10 Brilliant success. And beautiful and otherworldly. Like just mind-blowing to see the pink and purple.
49:19 And how come it doesn't have a fairing, man?
49:21 One year at Daytona, I showed up just as they were starting. They got their bike out of the crate.
49:29 And they gassed it up and aired it up. And they had it on the rollers. And it started up and it
49:34 just made this tremendous incoherent gobbling noise. And I said, "John, what's that about?"
49:40 He said, "Oh, it's not mapped below 3,000." Do you think it should be?
49:46 I was just going to say that. Like boring. Like what for? Like why would we?
49:52 Why don't you put it at 3,000 for? Yeah.
49:54 That's so emblematic. So that's really, yeah. What?
49:58 Yeah. Well, it's like talking to you about mid-range and an RD350
50:04 porting job. When I say mid-range and I say, "Well, yeah, I just want to run,
50:09 you know, I want to kind of pull 3,500, maybe 4,000, and you look at me and go, "Four?"
50:13 That was when I was in your shop and we were porting the RD350. And, you know, we just had a
50:23 different mindset about what was... Well, what you discover when you dig into those things is
50:29 that it's an organ pipe. And that organ pipe comes out of the front of the cylinder and passes under
50:36 the chassis. And that organ pipe has a very narrow range in which it can boost the airflow of the
50:43 engine. And when you're in that boost range, it goes like a rocket. And if you're out of that
50:48 boost range, the best you can hope for, well, we put a reed valve in it so that it doesn't blow all
50:54 the mixture back out the intake. So that's a plus. And it kind of will grrr along, but it's not
51:01 pulling. No. It's just like a motorized parade float at that point. This becomes a motorcycle
51:08 above 8,500, but right now we're trying to get to where we can do that. Just waiting to whisker a
51:14 plug. Yes. And we'll have a show where we talk about what's a whiskered plug anyway, because no
51:20 one knows anymore. Nobody knows anymore, but there's a lot of good stories there and an entire
51:27 priesthood, most of whom are dead. But the way things are looking right now, motorcycles might
51:35 not be immortal either. And so we have to just cope with the idea that there were these wonderful
51:42 technologies, fascinating people worked with them, had ideas about them, and then it was swept away
51:50 by a rules change or by the Clean Air Act of 1970 or by some other act of God. But the thing about
51:59 life is not gold, but living. And those people lived. Yep. All right, everybody, thanks for
52:09 listening. On that note, we will catch you next time. You can tune in for the whiskered plug
52:16 program or any other version of... You name it, it's coming. Any other version of our religion,
52:23 which is motorcycling. And thanks so much for listening. This program, in fact, was the result
52:29 of someone asking in the comments, could we do a program about Britain? I think it may have been on
52:36 the recent Harley podcast, which is why Harley sells millions of motorcycles. So you can hit
52:42 the playlist on YouTube. You can find us on Spotify and Apple podcasts and go back in the history.
52:50 We've got many, many episodes now and we're going to keep carrying on. Thanks, everybody.
52:55 Catch you next time. Yep.