NORTON UNCOVERED
Norton are preparing to make 2018 their biggest ever year. Mike Armitage enjoys a deafening rural blast with ambitious owner who’s hell-bent on winning the TT…
A ride with the boss, plus 1200cc V4, 650 twin and 2018 TT plans revealed
IT’S UNLIKE ANY other motorcycle noise I can think of. Part 1950s Grand Prix bike, part top-fuel dragster and part explosion in a munitions factory, this wondrous head-splitting racket is scattering cattle and has me considering shoving in a second pair of ear plugs. It’s being emitted by the Domiracer of Norton boss Stuart Garner and its megaphone pipes, which appear wide enough to consume an entire forearm. I know this because I tried before we set off from Norton’s Donington Hall base. Set in rolling grounds next to the Donington Park circuit, the imposing 200-year-old house seems a fitting home for the self-made bloke, who wanted to be a gamekeeper, and his expanding motorcycle factory. ‘I left school as soon as a I could,’ admits Stuart. ‘All I wanted to do was be a gamekeeper, and got job on YTS. Sixteen quid a week. It was mega.’ He left education without
qualifications – there was a chance of passing maths, but his Yamaha DT50MX broke down on the way to the exam. Work funded a Honda TL125 (that he still owns) and led to a Yamaha RD350LC and Kawasaki GPZ600R. It also paid for beer, and resulting lateness for work meant the sack from this dream job. ‘I thought my life had ended, but looking back it was my big opportunity. My girlfriend’s dad gave me a job in the warehouse at his firework business, on £70 a week – four times the salary. After a year I set-up on my own with a £500 ex-telecom van. I’d go to the wholesalers, load up and sell to local shops. They’d pay with rubber cheques, or count out a stack of twenties and some would go around twice. I was pissed off at the time, but they were massive lessons.’ The business really grew. By his mid-twenties Garner was spending weeks at a time in China selecting fireworks and had offices there. He then started taking an interest in other businesses and bought Spondon Engineering. This was the introduction to Norton, as Spondon made frames for the JPS rotary racers. By the 2000s the Norton name was owned by an American, Ollie Curme, who planned a new Commando with engineer Kenny Dreer. Stuart had spoken to them about running a Norton race team, an idea that didn’t get off the ground, then out of the blue he was offered the whole caboodle. ‘It was October 2008. They were selling in five days and said I needed to go to their office in Minnesota. It was Monday and if I wasn’t there by Friday, with a promise to make motorbikes, they were selling to a T-shirt maker.’ Motorcycle News ran a front-page story about Norton being back in the UK, causing the BBC to do a live breakfast-time interview. Norton was Garner on his own, so he dressed mates in branded clobber and borrowed an old bike as a prop. TV coverage resulted
in 200 inquisitive emails, one from a Triumph designer called Simon Skinner. Almost ten years later – and after redesigning every part of the unfinished American project – Skinner is now head of design and a company director, and Norton have sold around 2000 examples of his 961cc air-cooled twin-cylinder Commando. For Garner, reviving the famous model was a no-brainer, providing a bike with familiarity that buyers could easily understand. Back out on the lanes skipping along the Leicestershire/ Derbyshire boarder, the Commando I’m riding is certainly simple to understand. The pushrod motor and sensible gearing deliver easy-access thrust, steering is light and accurate, and a spacious riding position and full-grown dimensions give secure sensations. It feels how it looks.
‘The Holy Grail is lockout the podium. We want to say TT is ours’
Thankfully there’s also ample connection through the supple Öhlins suspension – Garner has total faith in cool tyres on a slick road, and with his local knowledge it’s an effort to stay close to his bellowing Domiracer. My ringing ears don’t mind. After scaring locals and blowing away cobwebs we head back, past the entrance to Donington Hall and down the hill to the Priest House hotel (which Stuart owns) for chip butty sustenance. I spend a few minutes soaking up the two pinging twins while Stuart makes an important call (he’s getting a man to feed his ducks– well, if you lived in Donington Hall, you would). Both the Commando and Stuart’s personal Domiracer have a not-quite-mass-produced feel. It’s a positive: they have the air of small-volume specials, something a little out of the ordinary.
Given bikes are built to order, by hand on a bench rather than on a production line, it’s to be expected. Garner doesn’t see Norton as occupying the same area as CCM or Ariel. He talks of being a small-scale producer, which looks towards the major players. ‘I don’t know if we have a direct competitor. I think the nearest is somewhere between Triumph and Harley-davidson – the brand isn’t the common denominator, it’s that they’re lifestyle purchases. This will change with the V4. And change again with the Scrambler.’ Ah yes, the new bikes. Though the Commando was a logical model, and will always be part of the lineup, Stuart is aware the brand couldn’t live off an air-cooled twin forever. And though Norton’s new V4 superbike might look like a huge step, to him it makes perfect sense. ‘I insisted on a modern sportsbike, and that we go TT racing. Norton is a racing brand. Look at Hislop’s TT win, all the Supercup wins, go back further to the Manx era – it’d be a travesty for Norton to not race. We knew six years ago we wanted to build a V4, hence the first SG1 race bike for the TT. We got a lot of stick for using the Aprilia engine, and it hurts me more than anyone. But we didn’t have £10 million when the project started to develop an engine and chassis, so we had to stagger them. The Aprilia engine was as close as we could get to what we wanted for our own V4.’ Greatly evolved in its relatively short racing life, the chassis of the racer is used with Norton’s own 1200cc V4 for the road bike. Developed with renowned experts Ricardo and launched at Motorcycle Live at the end of 2016, the limited-edition £44,000 SS version sold out almost immediately and the £28,000 RR fills the order book. Norton are aware what happens if you rush a product to market, and the V4 has always been ‘ready when it’s ready’. With the engine undergoing final calibration with Suter in Switzerland (yes, as in the Grand Prix outfit), Garner’s confident customers will start receiving bikes in May or June. Lop the 1200 in half and you have the newly-announced 650. Stroke is different but the pistons, gearbox, clutch, castings and so on are the same. So for around 130% of what developing one engine would cost, Norton get two. And they’ve sold it to China. ‘There are only a few people making engines, and generally all these guys talk to each other. I have a good rapport with Siddhartha Lal at Royal Enfield, we talk to MV Agusta and Bajaj and Mahindra. There are very few engine developers and makers, and even fewer selling engines. We knew Zongshen were in the market, they knew we were developing one. They’ll use it to make a cheaper bike and stay in the Asian market – there’s a restricted contract dictating which territories and who it can be sold to. I don’t want my competitors with that engine.’ Norton’s version of the 650 will be a higher spec and first used in a Scrambler, images of which were at Motorcycle Live. Prototypes will be running in the spring, with bikes on road at the end of this year. It’s just the start. ‘We want to race the Lightweight TT, so we’ll make a sportsbike,’ confirms Stuart. Supercharged? ‘Yes. It’ll have a carbon-fibre frame as well and a prototype will be ready before the end of 2018 – it’s already in-build from an engineering perspective.’ And with this his mind is back on the Isle of Man. Garner sees as an absolutely massive year for Norton, with the biggest order book in the reborn firm’s history, new models reaching customers and overseas tie-ups, yet he cannot help dreaming of a lump of rock drifting out there in the Irish Sea. He estimates last year’s two race bikes cost £250,000 to
‘It’s unlike any other motorcycle noise I can think of. Part 1950s Grand Prix bike, part top-fuel dragster and part explosion in a munitions factory’
£300,000 each. However, that bike is now effectively the V4 road bike – in theory Norton can take bikes off the line, swap engines, upgrade electronics, and go racing. Ideally this year’s bike will use the new 1200 engine, though the decision is likely to be made in March. Aprilia have agreed to supply latest-spec engines (‘1500km and they’re in the bin; all that survives is the cases’), and the frame is capable of taking either motor. ‘We can’t do Motogp or British Superbike, so the TT is how we show what we’re capable of,’ says Stuart. ‘We go racing once a year with a really well-turned-out bike. I don’t want to just win one, I want to win it, win it, win it. I could have factory riders and a really good factory-backed privateer team. And I can take as many riders as I want. Every top-ten rider I sign is someone else I don’t need to beat, because they’re on my bike. We could have one, two, three or four bikes – strategy at the minute is to take three. The Holy Grail is lock-out the podium, first, second and third. We want to say the TT is ours.’ Who will these riders be? Garner’s guarded, but says an announcement is due before the London Motorcycle Show in February that’s a ‘massive surprise’. He adopts his best poker face while I throw names about. Josh Brookes? Stuart won’t commit, but he seems certain to remain. What about Michael Dunlop? ‘He’ll be on a Suzuki, a Tyco BMW or a Norton,’ reckons Garner. ‘That’d be my second big announcement…’ It’s at this point I remember the press release from Honda, confirming Ian Hutchinson and Lee Johnston as their 2018 riders, meaning Guy Martin and John Mcguinness are without a ride. Has he got one of these legends on a Norton? Garner stares me in the eye, straight faced. ‘I wouldn’t sign Guy Martin.’ Massive year indeed…
‘We can’t do Motogp or BSB, so the TT is how we show what we’re capable of’