VOL. 51 ISSUE 33 AUGUST 19, 2014 P79
BY ALAN CATHCART
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEL EDGE
I
t's increasingly difficult nowa-
days to dream up a new way of
building a motorcycle – of think-
ing outside the box in terms of de-
sign and especially engine archi-
tecture. Honda's MotoGP world
title-winning V-five RC211V was the
last notable such example over a
decade ago – but now French en-
gineer Olivier Midy has come up
with something almost as innova-
tive: The flat-twin Midual Type 1
roadster.
Fittingly, the motorcycle made
its debut on the world stage on
August 17 at the annual ultra-high
end Pebble Beach Concours
d'Elegance in Monterey, Califor-
nia, catering to those of high net
worth who will regard the Midual's'
140,000 British Pound ($187,000)
starting price tag as fair value for a
hand-built two-wheeled work of art
that's really unlike any other motor-
cycle on planet Earth.
And it surely is - perhaps explain-
ing why Midy is able to confirm that
he already has orders for two bikes
with deposit, even before its world
launch at Pebble Beach.
A flat twin, you say – what's new
about that? BMW has been making
them for the past 90 years. Indeed
so – except that the German com-
pany's legendary Boxer twins have
always been built with horizontal
cylinders sticking out into the air-
stream for necessary cooling since
the days before motorcycles wore
radiators as a matter of course.
That feature has traditionally
