Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
ENFIELD BIGGER THAN BULLETS
Royal Enfield. Two little words which occupy a big space in my heart.
As those of you who have read my book Way To Go will know, in 1998 Paddy Minne and I rode two Bullet 500s from India the 7,000 miles back to the UK.
They looked beautiful, but were made of tinfoil and hope, to the extent that pretty much every bit that could vibrate its way loose would regularly do so, then fling itself into the road with gay abandon.
But then everything changed. In 2000, Royal Enfield was bought by the huge Indian corporation Eicher, whose founder Vikram Lal put his 26-year-old son Siddhartha in charge of a company staring into the abyss of bankruptcy.
Before long, its bikes sported a reliable unit construction engine, fuel injection, a five-speed gearbox, electric start and waiting lists that snaked back eight months. The machines still looked beautiful, but now they worked.
Eicher had saved Royal Enfield, and now Royal Enfield returned the favour. In 2010, the company sold 51,000 bikes. Today, it sells 800,000 a year, brings in 80% of Eicher’s profit and is the world’s biggest manufacturer of mid-range motorbikes.
And now, a new era dawns – a range of bikes designed from scratch and powered by an all-new 650cc parallel twin which is the firm’s first twin since 1967. It will free its bikes at last from being variations on the single-cylinder 350cc and 500cc Bullets.
Making 47bhp at 7,100 rpm and 38 lb ft of torque at 4,000 rpm, and with a six-speed gearbox and slipassist clutch, it should power the bike to a top speed of 90mph, and with a balancer shaft similar to that fitted to the company’s Himalayan, do it smoothly without the vibrations of the Bullet and Continental GT.
And, by the sound of the teaser video released by Royal Enfield, it’s accompanied by a delicious rumble which turns into a visceral snarl at speed.
This time, the Royal Enfield slogan Made Like A Gun is actually true. The new engines are bulletproof: subjected to the world’s toughest tests by being run flat out for 1,500 hours on a dyno and notching up one million kilometres on the road.
The first two models, revealed at the big EICMA show in Milan, are the Interceptor INT 650 and the Continental GT 650 – the first a nod to the 750 which was Enfield’s last twin in 1968, and the second the more muscular but smoother big brother of the 32bhp 535cc Continental GT.
They’ll be in the UK in
April, and I can’t wait to get a ride on them.