Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

eijNTAGETESTM.b~~rt~~~~~~~~~~ ~ You might ask, "Whyt" 0') ..... By Alan Cathcart Photos by Phil Masters ext time Eddie Lawson or Kevin Schwantz or any other of those two-wheeled rnegastars fortunate enough to be endowed with the talent to tame the current fire-eating breed of factory 500cc V4 GP road racers complains about the traction problems they encounter trying to feed l60-plus horsepower through a patch of rubber about eight inches wide. give 'em a copy of this test. I mean - every rally driver will tell you that front wheel drive is The Biz when it comes to finding traction in slippery conditions. Torque steer? Well, urn - yes, it can be a problem persuading the front wheels to point in any other direction than straight ahead when you're trying to feed about 300 turbocharged horsepower through 'th em but that's what power steering's for. isn 't it? So why not a front wheel drive bike, with a front tire twice the width of th e rear one and Roberto Gallina's patented differential steering to overcome torque steer. for example? Don 't reckon it? Nor do I - but if Fritz Cockerell were alive today, he 'd probably build just such a bike. Instead, he built the Megola - 70 years ago. The Megola was the product of a consortium formed by three German engineers MEixner. GOckerell (who confusingly later spelled his name with a 'C') and LAndgraf - hence the name of the company which was founded in Munich in 1921 to commercialize the two-wheeled design produced the previous year by Fritz Cockerell. This originally featured a three-cylinder engine located in th e rear wheel, soon replaced by a fivecylinder one. but by the time production began Cockerell had hi t on the novel ideal of switching the motor to the front wheel. Well - not totally novel, for in fact the idea had already been tried out not long beforehand in Britain. where Radco had produced an abortive FWD prototype two-wheeler in 1919, but where ever he got the idea from , Cockerell was firmly convinced that this was the hot lip in motorcycle design . and backed his hunch by putting the Megola into production. In spite of the many compromises the peculiar engine location entailed. which nowadays would be sufficient to prevent anyone even building a prototype other than out of a perverse desire to be different. no fewer than 2000 Megolas were built and sold during the next five years , before worsening economic conditions and rampant inflation in post-WWI Germany forced what was inevitably a luxury machine price-wise. out of production to be replaced by a more conven tional 175cc runabout bearing Cockerell's own name. If the idea that you could actually market a bike with a five-cylinder engine in the front wheel seems eccentric, what seems even more amazing in retrospect is that there were 2000 people ready to buy , such a machine in the 1920s. However, that's practically normal behavior alongside the thought of actually racing one. which seems like a recipe for a ticket to the funny farm - yet that's exactly what happened. In addition to the Megola Touring mod el whose armchair-type seating recall s one of today's equally eccentric FF/ Feet Forward devices - the factory also built and sold a Sport model for N competition, which became a regular contestant in the hands of vari ous customers in both dirt track and road racing in Germany during the I920s, Well - not quite road raci ng as we know it today, becau se with no clutch. no gearbox and no front brake , the Renn-Megola was hardly the thing for the Isle of Man or the Nurburgring (wh ich actually hadn't been built yet, but you get the idea), more for Ilat out blasts around paved ovals like the Grenzlandring or up and down the two carriageways of an autobahn with a banking at one end, like the Avus in Berlin . It was at Avus that the most intrepid of the Megola-rnaniacs, works rider Toni Bauhofer, averaged no less than 88 mph in 1924, proclaiming himself German Champion later that year with a win in the Schleizer-Dreieck race. in which he defeated th e works BMW team to win the title. Con sidering that I can not only report having sighted one of these Loch Ness monsters of motorcycledom, but actually ridden it as well. Having lived to tell the tale , I can only say that Fritz Cockerell had both a warped sense of humor and a devious urge to create a motorcycling mutant. an opinion shared by my friend jeff Craig in Pennsylvania. who was en trusted with th e task of getting what must surely be th e only Megola racer in North Ameri ca functioning aga in o n behalf of its owner, an anonymous collector who brought the bik e back from Germany after the war in partially assembled form, but with the in valuable bonus of a spare front wheel - which is to say, enginel Apparently the bike had been mixed up in some smuggling plot involving shaft rotates. usually with a propellor attached to one end," Craig said. "The Megola isn't a radial. it's a rotary, because the cylinders rotate and just the bearing housing is stationary, in effect acting as the front wheel spindle. The same principle was used on certain WWI aircraft, the two most famous of whi ch were the Sopwith Camel and the Fokker Triplane - they were rotaries too." So there, Norton - eat your hear ts out: Thought yo u had the world's first rotary racer , huh? Of course, the Wankel rotary principle as employed on the current Norton is quite different from the Megola's rotary design, which is still based on good old-fashioned fourstroke principles, entailing five side- the use of its pressed-steel monocoque chassis as a receptacle for contraband and was seized by the Occupying Forces. then sold off. Once in the V.S., jeff's friend eventually pieced it together and got it running, but it wouldn't pull any revs. Rebuilding a Megola engine once is enough for most sane people, so he left it at that until last year when he decided it might be nice .to get it running properly: jeff Craig was masochist enough to agree to try .and do so - which is where we carne m. If trying to grasp why anyone would want to build a motorcycle with the engine inside the front wheel is hard enough, describing how Cockerell did so without writing a thesis on the subject is doubly difficult - but here goes. Firstly, though, the Megola's engine is often described as a radial design - but according to Craig, this is a terminological inexactitude. "A radial engine is one where the cylinders remain static but the crank- valve longitudinally finned cylinders measuring 52x60 mm for a tptal capacity of 637cc. disposed at 72 degrees to one another like the points of a star, to form a complete circle. The spokes of the front wheel are laced to what is in effect the crankcase, and completely enclosed the engine: this meant that Megola-maniac racers could onl y change gearing for different tracks by dint of changing wheel rim diameters, including. of course, the tires. PUlS a new gloss on the current debate in Grand Prix racing as to whether a 16, 17 or 18-inch front tire is best, doesn't it? Since in order to do this, you had to relace the new rim to the engine, it comes as no surprise to learn that Megola-maniacs carried different engines already installed in wheels of varying diameters so as to be able to swap the complete unit over if they needed tol Locating the engine in this unlikely position did at least ensure that cylinder cooling was never a problem, but it did present additional engineering challenges, the solution of which stamp Fritz Cockerell with the mark of a brillant, if unconventional, engineer. Think of it for a moment: How would you supply an engine located within a rotating wheel- front or rear - with fuel and Iubricant, let alone work out an exhaust system or feed sparks to the plugs I Not many people would come up with an answer that worked, but Cockerell did so by casting a circular crankcase about 7 in .ll75 mm across to which the cylinders are radially attached, the whole acting as a giant wheel hub to which the rim and tire are fitted, with the entire resultant assembly rotating on two very large-diameter stationary bearings fixed to the inverted V -shaped support which sits at the front end of the fiveleaf quarter-elliptic spring which Some 70 years ago a consortium of three German engineers built the Megola, a motorcycle with its fivecylinder engine mounted on the front wheel. Over 2000 of the Megolas were sold in post-WWII Gerinany. then, as now. the Schleiz circuit had more than a few wiggly bits, he must also have been a very brave as well as skillful .riderl However, it was in oval track racing in loose sand that the Megola really excelled, the qualities of FWD becoming more readily apparent in conditions where traction was at a premium - as the current research into 2WD motocross development by Sunshine in Britain confirms. Being able to hang the rear wheel out while keeping the throttle cranked wide open, safe in the knowledge that the front wheel is pulling you along in the direction you're pointing it makes the whole convoluted process of concocting such a device worthwhile. Well, almost, Not many of the 2000 Megolas built in the '20s have survived, especially not the high(er)-performance Sport racing model, making the thing one of those semi-mythical weird -Harold contraptions you see in history books but never in the flesh. so to speak. Now . however,

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