Saturday 21 January 2012

Royal Enfield Dirt Track racer

Based on the same Classic 500 as our project, this beauty shows more potential of the latest, electric start Indian-built singles. We saw this bike a while ago, but caught up with it again via Motorcycle Photo of the Day. I've nicked this whole explanation from MPOTD, so go check them out. Some great bikes over there.
This was built by Doug Douglas Motorcycles of San Bernadino, Ca. G

The bike you’re talking about is our prototype for a streettracker that we are making parts for. This is something that’s been in the works for about a year off and on and we just got it all together the other day so we could bring it to the IMS show. It has yet to turn a wheel at the track so I don’t have much to say about riding it…yet.

We plan to be up and running building street legal bikes with the parts we are developing within a few months. We still have a lot to do in developing this as a racer but that will progress throughout the year as we develop performance items and test chassis issues not to mention the new parts we are creating.

So, to give you a rundown on what we have so far: New swingarm that is stronger and slightly longer than stock. It uses a disk brake as opposed to the stock drum brake and that’s a major upgrade to begin with. The forks are 43mm R6 modified for flattrack and they are in adjustable triple clamps that have been annodized black and this particular set is engraved “Royal Enfield”. We built the seat loop to use a Champion 250 style seat base and Saddlemen made us the seat. We have relocated the electrics including the battery for looks as well as to protect those pieces. The stainless steel exhaust is a race only unit that’s really loud.

For all of these parts we have some development that will continue before we are willing to offer them to the public but it will come soon enough. The idea is two fold…we do want to race this bike and hopefully it gets a following in amateur racing (ed this seems like a natural!) since there’s not many modern bikes besides dirtbikes that are used for flattrack any longer. So this is that alternative for the guy who wants a proper looking bike and yet wants electric start and reliability. The second part is as a street tracker that allows someone to have a bad-ass conversation piece with a warrantew and can be financed and depending on ow he options it up the price would be $10k to 15k. That’s about half what other builders are getting for their street trackers that are based on old bikes that can’t even be financed let alone have modern comforts such as the e start button and fuel injection.

We think we have a winner on and off the track. For now, we’re just enjoying the build. 90% of the project at this point is personal satisfaction.
Take care
Art

2 comments:

Chris said...

THAT is very toothsome indeed. It gets a genuine tracker look but with a curviness to the back-end that compliments the Bullet lines beautifully...

JamesJ said...

....but what about the business end?