‘PEOPLE RESPOND TO EMOTIONAL PRODUCTS’

American Adrian Sellers, 37, has previously worked for Kawasaki, Yamaha and Honda. He spearheads the design of future Royal Enfields and supervises the custom project.

“I’d been attending custom events in Europe for a few years – the scene is great for getting a feel for how the market is moving. I got the budget to build two bikes for Wheels and Waves at Biarritz in 2016, to showcase the diversity of possibility with our bikes. It’s snowballed from there. I was hired to work on production models, but custom work has become a division in itself.

“It could be that there’ll be a Royal Enfield division which produces small-volume custom bikes for sale. We occasionally do special editions of 500 or 1000, and they tend to sell out, particularly in India. Enfields are eminently suitable for customisation: there’s very little plastic, and the electronics are simple. I’ve been giving bikes to builders who haven’t worked on Enfields before, and the first message I always get back is, ‘I unplugged almost everything and it was still working!’ If you work on a BMW or Ducati, you pull one wire out and the whole thing shuts down.

“With the Lock Stock we’ve gone beyond visual customisation, to demonstrate the potential of the twin. We’ll take it racing this year – they have a sprint at Wheels and Waves, and there’s a race at Glemseck 101, too. We’re also looking at taking it to Bonneville to go after speed records. We’re making two – we have this version with an engine capacity close to 900cc, but the next one will have stock capacity with similar performance modifications. But we’ll still continue customising singles – quite a few of the builds we have going this year are Himalayans and Classics.”