Equal parts cafe & racer
The old boys at the Ace Cafe would have loved this – a 200bhp cafe racer that really can race
Alot of modern cafe racers consist of a lot of cafe, and not much racer – they’re just beautiful styling exercises, mimicking the look of those original Tritons, Manxes and Gold Stars. This one is different: it’s powered by a tuned R1 engine and weighs just 180kg.
‘I’ve always modified my bikes,’ Rob Catanese tells Bike, ‘and one day I was sitting in a bar with a friend talking about how we’d like a bike with modern tech but a cafe racer feel, and I just drew this on a napkin. That’s how it started.’
Rob then took the napkin to Framecrafters, a company near him in Illinois, USA, specialising in building racers and replica chassis for old British iron. ‘They loved the idea,’ says Rob. ‘I explained I wanted one of the most powerful motors I could find, but in a bike that looks like a 1970s cafe racer.’
The original plan was for Rob to buy a new R1 engine in a crate from Yamaha, but when that turned out to be prohibitively expensive, he found a mint R1 and disassembled that instead. ‘It was a two-year-old, 3000-mile donor bike that had never seen rain, so it looked like it was new. Plus, the advantage of having an actual bike was that we had the geometry points [so the new machine could have identical geometry to an R1]. Once we’d got those, I stripped everything off and sold it. I only kept the engine, ECU and forks.’ Rob handed the motor over to Framecrafters who set about building a chromoly steel tube frame and swingarm, using the engine as a stressed member. When they’d finished, Rob sent the whole lot to be nickel-plated, as a nod to the Rickman frames of those early cafe racers.
‘I really just let Framecrafters get on with it – they just had my napkin sketch to go on. The biggest issue we had in terms of the design was the titanium exhaust. If you look at the mid-pipe by the
footrests, Karsten [Illg from Framecrafters] was dead set on putting a muffler on it, but I thought it would just ruin the look. In the end I persuaded him to just cut the damn pipe and let it be loud. That’s the way I wanted it.
‘The look is a hybrid of lots of bikes. I’ve always been a Yamaha guy, but I love V-twins too, and the fairing and rear cowl are Ducati 750SS replicas.’ The fuel tank is hand-beaten aluminium, holding a superbly practical five gallons.
Neat touches abound, but most interesting is the swingarm, where it looks like the steel tube joins a billet aluminium axle carrier – a
‘It’s my daily driver, mostly I just commute on it’
tricky weld. ‘There’s no welding, it’s bonded,’ says Rob. ‘It’s clever because the engine’s torque is so huge that to keep the swingarm together means that bond must be incredibly strong. I take zero credit for that – it’s technology developed by Framecrafters.’
It didn’t all go to plan though. ‘The first time I got on the gas hard it blew out the chain tensioners so we had to change them to titanium. And if you look at the rear axle area and the chain adjuster, the work there is incredible.
‘The whole bike feels rigid and it handles amazingly well. Last year I put BST carbon fibre wheels on it and now the bike is just sick. I’ve never ridden anything like it.
‘It’s actually my daily driver. I’ve done trackdays, but mostly I just commute on it – it starts every time, there’s lots of power and it blows people’s minds. I can’t even go to the local convenience store without someone commenting on it. It feeds my soul.’