New-era Nortons bolted together at the Donington Hall factory
From boom to bust and back again, Norton survived a tough re-birth to emerge as a serious bike business
Few other brands can luxuriate in such a globally recognisable name as Norton. With 100 years of legendary road bikes and racing success underpinning the logo, it’s now been ten years since its serious rebirth in the hands of Stuart Garner, who has dragged Norton kicking and screaming into a new century and made it a global force once again. Founded in 1898 by James Lansdowne Norton, the first Norton Motorcycle appeared in 1902, and a mere five years later famously took Rem Fowler to victory in the twincylinder class at the very first Isle of Man TT races. In 1907 Norton started production of their own engines. Fast forward through two World Wars, and almost 100 TT victories, and the ignominious collapse of the British bike industry, and ownership eventually travelled across the pond for 15 years to Oregon-based Kenny Dreer, whose aspirations for rebirth saw him get close to launching a new Commando. But it wasn’t to be and in late 2008 Garner stepped in and brought Norton back to Britain. Learning from the lessons of Dreer’s attempted brand reinvention, work started on re-engineering the Commando 961 prototype immediately. “This isn’t some kind of romanticised return for Norton,” Garner told MCN back in 2008. “I am serious about this. I want it to be a proper bike firm producing niche motorcycles.”
The Commando that emerged a year later, and was delivered into the hands of expectant customers in 2010, was not without its problems. Garner’s commitment to setting up a largely UK supply chain also nearly sank the firm’s nascent return. But with dogged determination, the problems were gradually ironed out, and the original Commando 961 was replaced by the far more resolved
MkII in 2015, two years after the firm’s relocation to Donington Hall and Hastings House.
With a decade of growth and supply chain turmoil under their belts, the firm are now fitter than ever. With investment in new model development, the ever-growing facilities at Donington Hall, the creation of the factory-based British Motorcycle Manufacturing Academy, a competitive TT race bike and a lucrative engine licensing deal with Chinese giant Zongshen; Norton is on the up.
The global reach now extends as far as Australia, Hong Kong, Jordan and the USA, and Norton currently export around 80% of their new bikes, with production creeping towards 1000 units. That production capacity will be further boosted by the arrival of the V4, and the proposed new family of 650cc parallel-twins which is set to start with the scrambler-styled Atlas next year.
“I try to put myself in the mind of the Norton engineers from the 1950s,” says Garner, “and think ‘what Nortons would they be building if they’d been in continuous development?’. That’s the thought process that underpins how we look at Norton today.”