VOL. 50 ISSUE 40 OCTOBER 8, 2013
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1. The 535cc pushrod single
produces 29.1 horsepower at
5100 rpm.
2. The bike gets bar-end mirrors
that work well.
3. The Royal Enfield gets Paioli
rear shocks that give just 3.1
inches of travel.
4. The dash is clean and mostly
analog. As it should be.
5. The author liked the seat for
both comfort and looks.
To create the new Continental
GT selling for an attractive $7200
(complete with two-year unlimited
mileage warranty), Eicher enlisted
the services of two key companies in today's British motorcycle
industry. To get the styling right
they firstly talked to brand experts
and then enlisted the services of
Xenophya Design, the company
lately best known for creating the
Triumph 1200 Explorer.
To engineer the result, Eicher
commissioned top U.K. frame
specialists Harris Performance to
create a good-handling package
P61
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in the café racing context.
"It helped that me and my
brother Lester were both café
racers ourselves back in the
1960s, before we started building bikes to go road racing on
proper circuits," says Harris boss
Steve Harris. "We used to go to
the Busy Bee café on the Watford By-Pass, which was the Ace
Café's big rival. So when Royal
Enfield came calling for us to create the cycle parts for the Continental GT, it was mainly a question of going back to our roots."
The result is an all-new dedicated tubular steel frame for the
Continental GT that isn't shared
with any other Royal Enfield model – yet – and whose twin-loop
double-cradle format has a clear
visual association with the legendary '60s Manx Norton Featherbed frame. But the new bike's
geometry is much sharper than
the Norton's, with the 41mm Enfield-made fork offering 110mm of
wheel travel set at a 25.5-degree
head angle with 98mm of trail.
So the result delivers what Steve
Harris terms "modern handling,
but in a period context," with
twin Paioli gas shocks giving just
3.1-inches of travel at the rear.
The 53.5-inch wheelbase is
quite short, delivering light handling coupled with deft steering
thanks to much tighter steering
geometry than old Enfields ever
had. The 18-inch wire wheels' alloy rims are shod with authenticlooking Pirelli Sport Demon tires
that are a continuation of the
batch especially created by the
Italian tire manufacturer to equip
the Ducati Sport Classic range
launched in 2005.
The Brembo front brake package sees a single 300mm fixed
front disc mounted on the left,
gripped by a floating two-piston
caliper from Italy, with the 240mm
rear disc and single-pot rear caliper locally sourced in India. Together, these slow a bike with a
dry weight of 379 pounds (and a
