‘Peter wanted to transform the motorcycle chassis’
the Matchless with six-spoke magnesium alloy wheels. The motorcycle world has never been very forward looking, so his latest brainwave was greeted with sniggers and the bike was nicknamed Wagon Wheels.
The combination of Williams’s fluid riding and the G50’s cuttingedge chassis technology was a potent combination, especially on the Isle of Man, where real speed comes from maintaining momentum.
Between 1967 and 1973 Williams and the Arter Matchless finished runner-up in the Senior TT on four occasions, beaten only by Hailwood on the Honda, Ago on the MV and Jack Findlay on Suzuki’s first 500 GP bike, the two-stroke XR05. Williams could not ignore the rise of the two-stroke. Indeed he might’ve had a factory Yamaha ride in 1968, but for his modesty. At the 1967 TT he was approached by Yamaha management, who wanted to know if he could beat Hailwood. Williams answered in the negative, even though he had on occasion beaten Mike the Bike.
His next two-stroke chance came in 1971, when MZ race boss Walter Kaaden gave him a last-minute ride in the 250cc TT. Williams hadn’t even practised on Kaaden’s tandem twin, so he rode steadily on the opening lap. To his surprise he had no trouble keeping Phil Read’s winning Yamaha in sight and was confident of taking the lead, until the MZ did what two-strokes did and seized a piston.
Two months later he was back on an MZ, in the Ulster 350cc GP at Dundrod. The race was run in torrential rain, with Williams chasing Jarno Saarinen. When the Finnish legend slid off Williams slipped past to take his only GP victory.
Kaaden and Williams would’ve made a great engineering team – Kaaden with his game-changing engine technology and Williams with his go-ahead chassis ideas. But Williams was already employed at Norton, now absorbed into Norton Villiers, the AJS/ Matchless/Norton conglomerate that had been established in 1966 following the collapse of AMC. These were the dying days of the British motorcycle industry. He joined Norton in 1969, working in the Norton Villiers Performance Shop, based in an old RAF office at Thruxton airfield, from where gliders had flown on D-Day in June 1944.
His first job was to prepare a Norton Commando for the 1969 Production TT, but Williams hated working on production bikes, because they gave him no chance to push motorcycle engineering forward. The following year Norton bosses heard his pleas and gave him the go ahead to design a race bike for the new F750 championship, created to give Norton twins, Triumph triples and Honda fours somewhere to play, safe from twostroke GP bikes.
This was his moment, when he could apply his blue-sky thinking to racing motorcycles, with a halfdecent budget behind him. The result was the monocoque John Player Norton of 1973. Williams wanted to transform the motorcycle chassis into something more than just a home for the engine. His steel monocoque decreased frontal area and improved aerodynamics by lowering the motorcycle, via moving the fuel from above the engine to pannier tanks within the monocoque, which also incorporated the oil tank and ducts to improve engine cooling. Some pit-lane people still consider the JPN monocoque to be the grandfather of today’s typical twin-spar superbike frames. Williams didn’t just design the monocoque, he also raced it with great success. In April 1973 he was the top-scoring rider in the AngloAmerican Transatlantic Match races, bettering two-stroke stars like Barry Sheene and Gary Nixon. His most famous victory was the 1973 F750 TT, but his greatest victory was probably the 1972 Hutchinson 100, run the wrong way around Brands Hatch, when he passed Ago’s mighty MV aboard the Arter Matchless and sent the crowd into ecstasy.
Sadly the monocoque Norton was doomed to failure. Not because there was anything wrong with the chassis but because the F750 class also fell to the fiery two-strokes: Suzuki’s XR11, Kawasaki’s H2R and Yamaha’s TZ750.
In 1974 Norton stunned Williams by ending development of the monocoque and replacing it with a more conventional tubular-steel space frame. Williams was angered by the decision, which he attributed to jealousy and politics.
His racing career came to an end at Oulton Park in August 1974 when the Norton’s tank/seat unit came adrift, causing a huge crash. His heart stopped beating while he lay trackside and although he eventually recovered, the accident had severed nerves in his left arm. Williams worked in car engineering after the crash, with Lotus and Cosworth, where, among other things, he designed a desmodromic valve system for Cosworth’s V8 Formula 1 engine. Peter Williams (born August 27, 1939, died December 20, 2020) is survived by sister Andrea Coleman (another former racer and founder of the Two Wheels For Life charity), wife Pam and six children, four from two previous marriages.