RACER TEST
between my ears!"' the 33-year-old proprietor of Britain's smallest, and newest,
motorcycle manufacturer says. "'I used
to be a textile-machinery design engineer, so I can do a passable technical
sketch to show the craftsmen who make
bits for me what it is I want. Then they
either draw it up, or else produce a
working model, which we then modify
till it's right. But I have no engineering
qualifiCations at all, which I believe
was a positive asset when it came to
building my first bike. I just made
what I thought would work - and it
did."'
ASP? Alternative Suspension
Project? No. The letters stand for
Andy Stevenson's Pet, one that he's
lavished the past half-decade of his
life on. In fact, he's now sold off
his Moto Elite motorcycle camping
business in order to concentrate
100 percent on building the ASP
in limited-production, street-legal
form.
What began as a radical what-
By Alan Cathcart
Photos by Kyolchi Nakamura
he world is full of dreamers, each one convinced he or she
can build a better bike, usually incorporating radical styling
or avant-garde engineering that looks good on paper but is
a long way from being practical. Paper is usually the only
medium these wannabe techno-freaks ever work in - but
just once in a while someone has a better-bike idea that gets
turned into reality, generally because he's a doer as well as a thinker,
one moreover with a strong grip on reality.
Andy Stevenson is just such a man, but perhaps the main reason
his FZRlOOO EXUP Yamaha-powered ASP prototype ever got built at
all is because he constructed it without drawing it up first.
"'I ca1,"t afford a CAM/CAD system, so 1 have to use the one
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