Motorcycle News - A Ducati speedway motorcycle, imagined by Wreckless
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They’re also rather squashed-looking machines, with stubby hardtails and forks raked steeper than the most extreme sportbike. But this creation from England’s Wreckless Motorcycles is a thing of strange beauty.
In the 1970s, teenage Rick went to Denmark on holiday with his family. “I got hooked on speedway,” he reveals. “Riders like Ivan Mauger, Peter Collins and Denmark’s own Ole Olesen were dominating the sport, winning multiple world titles.”
“It was in of a jumble of vintage Ducati parts from the early 1970s. I said to Iain, my collaborator in Wreckless: ‘I want to build a speedway bike’.”
“It’s a Jawa, we believe,” says Rick. “It competed at some point, but we don’t have the specific history of it.” Iain started altering the frame to accept the motor and create a rolling chassis.
“So this bike is a celebration of Ivan. But I also wanted to acknowledge a current hero of mine, F1 driver Lewis Hamilton.”
The header pipe is handmade, and mated to a tiny 900 gram Akrapovič slip-on muffler, originally designed for the Yamaha R3.
“They’ve been cut and lengthened by about four inches, to give us the clearance we needed for the front wheel,” says Rick. “Mating the frame with an unusual motor can mean altering the frame orientation, which affects the headstock position and then the rake, and so on.” The forks are hooked up to Renthal bars lifted from a KTM SX85.
The wheels are the real deal: a custom set built by SM Pro, a British race specialist that can trace its history back 120 years. They’re a standard speedway setup, 23” x 1.60” at the front and 19” x 2.15” at the back, shod with Mitas race tires. (A carbon fiber speedway fender controls the spray of dirt.)
Another departure from the speedway norm is a pair of rear shocks. These are Marzocchi MOTO C2R units, originally designed for mountain bikes. They’re adjustable for rebound, have separate low- and high-speed compression controls, and are now fitted with Cane Creek double barrel coil springs.
When it came to the paint Rick decided on a Mercedes F1 scheme, in tribute to LH44, and has nicknamed the bike ‘the H4MM4.’
The colors were shot by Jason Fowler of JLF Designs, who’s worked for not only Lewis Hamilton, but also the late Indianapolis 500 winner Dan Wheldon and IndyCar driver Max Chilton.
“I’m lucky, because I could build it for the sheer hell of it. Ducati never made a speedway bike, but if they did, we hope it would look something like this.” Wreckless Motorcycles | Facebook | Instagram | Images by Daniel Du Cros at Junction11 Studios Motorcycles via Bike EXIF http://www.bikeexif.com February 22, 2019 at 11:28AM Leave a Reply. |
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2/22/2019
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