21st century superbike plans
During the last years of his life Williams was keen to reintroduce some of his ideas into motorcycling. This time he wanted to go further than he had when he was at Norton, making the monocoque do another job, as the bodywork, rather like Honda’s original NR500. While employed at Lotus, Williams convinced management to let him create a Lotus motorcycle, but he didn’t get far with the Moto Guzzi-powered monocoque. Thus in August 2012 he established Peter Williams Motorcycles, with the ultimate goal of creating a carbon-fibre monocoque superbike.
To finance his ambitions PWM needed to raise significant capital, so the company built a limited run of John Player Norton monocoque F750 replicas. An original owned by the National Motorcycle Museum was measured and scanned to allow
PWM to reverse-engineer the machine using CAD.
Like the originals the replicas used steel monocoques, but this time the sheet steel was cut by laser, not with tin snips! Inside the chassis were brandnew Commando engines, built from newly manufactured parts, always in demand from owners of classic Nortons. Amazingly the wheels were cast by the same company that cast the originals back in the 1970s. Just four of the replicas were built, each retailing at £65,000. Williams also had plans to build replicas of his Arter Matchless single, again with the idea of financing a modern PWM machine.
PWM got as far as fabricating a steel prototype, using a Honda CBR600 engine, but the plan to create a final CBR1000-powered carbon-fibre monocoque sadly never came to fruition.