NORTON’S BACK

Brit superbike maker Norton is back with a new factory, new owners, and new management. We spoke to the firm’s COO about the future.

There’s been no shortage of news from Norton in the past few years – much of it bad. But the distressed Brit bike brand looks to have turned the corner of late, after Indian giant TVS (the fourth biggest bike maker in the world) took over from the disgraced former regime under Stuart Garner. There’s a new £40 million Norton factory in Birmingham, bikes are starting to be built properly, and there’s a new management team in place. We spoke to one of them, chief operating officer Christian Gladwell, on the plush Norton stand at the NEC show.

Gladwell isn’t your typical bike firm boss. He was an officer in the Scots Guards and came to Norton from Saatchi, where he’d worked on developing luxury brands like Chanel, Gucci, Burberry and Breitling – as well as helping launch Jay-Z’s cologne range… He’s been riding bikes for years though, and currently owns an MV Agusta Turismo Veloce and a Norton Commando 961, so he knows what a bike brand needs to do.

We kick off by talking about his ‘vision’ for what sort of bike firm Norton should be, and Gladwell has some pretty interesting responses.

“Our theory is to give people a really luxurious option for fit and finish in terms of materials, in terms of achingly beautiful design – and that starts with reliability, being able to back up all of the things that the motorcycles visually tell you they should do. So we are never going to be Honda and we don’t want to be Honda, and that’s nothing against Honda. It does things brilliantly, but we don’t want to sell that kind of volume.

“Neither are we Brough Superior; we’re not 1000 bikes a year. We want to be in the middle. Peak production for us looks like 40,000 motorcycles a year in six or seven years’ time – which is a decent business. I mean it’s not Ducati, it’s like two-thirds of Ducati in terms of volume.”

And that obviously means new bikes. “We will have a much broader product range than we have at the moment, obviously, and up to maybe 50% of that will be electric. We’ve just won the lead role in an advanced propulsion centre consortium for £60 million of government funding for an electric hyperbike, and that’s the new form of Norton innovation.”

One thing we won’t see any time soon is the Atlas 650 twin that was promised by the previous owners at Norton, using half the V-4 engine. “Look, [cancelling the Atlas was] a really difficult decision to make. In a perfect world we’d do everything, but we’ve only got a certain amount of resources. We need to focus on what’s doable and not let people down by delivering something at 60%. If the question is are there plans in the future for a fully homologated scrambler twin and derivatives, yes for sure, but we’ve made a decision. We are not in the market of making a parallel twin 650 super light at £12k in the foreseeable future.”

The immediate focus will be on the V4 platform then, it seems. “I had a really good feeling this morning for the V4s,” says Gladwell. “I was doing an interview and was asked what’s the most successful bike, and it’s the V4 – and that sort of took me by surprise.