Like a scoot, but faster
…much, much faster. But then, what do you expect from a scooter designed by a bike-mad ex-f1 engineer?
Iwanted something that blurred the division between scooter and motorcycle,’ says John Piper, an ex-f1 designer with no shortage of bike experience – he designed the Foggy Petronas World Superbike and currently has 11 motorcycles stuffed into his shed. ‘I wanted something you could ride like a motorbike, but that looked like a scooter – basically, a Lambretta on steroids.’
The result is this, the J-series: a 120mph, 70bhp scoot with 17in wheels, 52-degrees of lean angle and the immaculate finish you’d expect of someone who spent most of his career designing and making parts for Williams’ F1 cars.
John took the market positioning of the J-series just as seriously: ‘I benchmarked all the maxi scooters – the BMW 650 twin, the Suzuki Burgman and the Yamaha T-max. They were all very different, and I wanted to extract the best bits and put them into one scooter. I noted every attribute – length, weight, lean angle, brake size, seat height, power – and aimed my spec at beating every single one. Which we did. The attributes were the dots that join together to describe the envelope you have to operate inside.’
Once he had a detailed objective, John set about finding a suitable donor bike. ‘I went to Fowlers in Bristol and they’d got a KTM supermoto [a 690 SMC R – Ed] that they’d had in the showroom for years. I guess someone had said they’d buy it and then backed out because it was registered. I asked how much they wanted for it. I got a great deal, rode it home and took it to pieces.’
At the time, John was teaching product design at the University of the West of England in Bristol and borrowed a studio to do the clay modelling. ‘I enlisted the help of a friend called Steve Everitt [a fellow designer who now works for Royal Enfield] and involved a lot of the students. I loved working with them.
‘We started with 17in wheels and wanted 55 degrees of lean, but couldn’t quite get that so settled on 52. The bike had to be around the 160kg mark – all the maxi scooters are over 200kg – and have 50/50 weight distribution. We built a seating buck and got lots of different shaped people to sit on it. Then we made a clay model.’
‘I wanted the best bits and put them into one scooter’
And the trickiest bits? ‘Getting the panel fits right was difficult. Heat management is tricky too. Because I’m a racing car designer I know how to package things very close together, but I didn’t know until we fired it up whether it was going to overheat. We ceramiccoated the exhaust downpipe and there’s a lot of Zircotec ceramic on the inside of the bodywork, and there’s gold foil on the inside of the rear clamshell. It works – it hasn’t blistered the paint yet.
‘I’ve ridden it a fair bit and it’s an odd feeling – you’re used to sitting on a motorbike with your legs round it, and this is like sitting on the toilet and having 70bhp under your bum. It’s good fun but I found in traffic I was constantly hunting between first and second. That needs changing.’
So having created what looks like a very slick production prototype, will John be making more? ‘Do I want to go into mass
production? Nah. I can’t see how that would work. I would love someone to buy it though, or for someone to ask me to build them one. That would mean I could fund the next projects. I want to supercharge a Guzzi T3 I’ve got and turn it into a desert sled. But it’ll be for me, so more of a desert shopping bike…’
» If you’ve £40,000 or so to spare and fancy a J-series, contact John at pipermoto.com