Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/694857
INTERVIEW NORTON MOTORCYCLES OWNER STUART GARNER P86 are you able to keep up with demand? Just about. We've added some extra assembly bays. We don't have a production line, because each motorcycle is built by a team of two technicians, plus an apprentice who helps and learns from them. We're up to around 150 people in the building right now, split about 50/50 between full-time work- ers and apprentices. I understand you're plan- ning a volume production product in the form of a new 650 twin, as a spinoff from a forthcoming 1200cc Norton V4. What are your plans for these, and when will they reach production? Well, you might call it a volume product and I suppose it could be in Norton terms, but I don't think the 650 twin will be one by the standards of other brands. Yes, it is indeed on the engi- neers' drawing board, it's been there for a good few months, and it will once again be a par- allel-twin which, in essence, is derived from the 1200cc 72ยบ V4 we're also working on, so there will be a reasonable amount of similarity between the two. I'll let Simon Skinner, our Head of Design, tell you all about the V4 that's coming up first, but the 650 will be a liquid-cooled, double overhead cam, eight- valve parallel-twin, and its engine will essentially be the V4 with one bank of cylinders chopped off it, so there will be some con- siderable engineering overlap. For a small business like ours to have two brand new engines in development at the same time is an incredibly big financial commitment, and potentially very risky. We've now started what is a very important two-year development window for Norton to get these engines perfected, and powering new models in the marketplace. But they'll be quite different from our existing core product, the pushrod air/oil- cooled Commando which will, of course, stay in production, and will be unaffected by these two new platforms. When do you expect to launch the 650? In fact, we're looking at launching the 1200cc V4 first at the [Birmingham] NEC Show this November, and the 650 there in November 2017. We've not yet determined prices and produc- tion volumes for the V4, which is out at the end of this year, so we're still a way away. What sort of model do you envisage launching the 650 twin as, will it be a naked bike? We're having some fun with that, and right now we're think- ing it could make a fabulous supercharged sportbike, we'd come in at the top of the market with the high performance ver- sion, and then develop various