Norton Navigator

Norton’s 350cc twin fought against old prejudices, but this one has been given a new lease of life

Imagine your biking history is that you rode a Suzuki X1 sports moped on L-plates, then after you passed your bike test in 1997, you rode a Honda VFR400, a Husqvarna 610, a Kawasaki ZX7R and a Honda CB600RR. And then you decide you want a British classic. Where should you start?

The man facing this dilemma was Paul Cross. He works for Williams, the F1 car builder, in its advanced engineering department, and has been working on developing a battery to supply Triumph for its proposed electric sports bike.

Then Paul found a Norton Navigator for sale locally. “It just came at the right price” he said, snapping it up, bringing it home, and getting to work, having decided to turn it into a café racer. It fits in rather better with the Cotswold village he lives in than a howling sports bike – though it does have a howl of its own.

“When I came here, I had a VW Golf with a dump valve but it didn’t fit in as everyone round here has classic cars and bikes,” he said. “The engine had been worked on, and I had no worries in that department.”

He decided that when creating the café racer, there should not be any changes to the structure of the bike. “I kept all the parts I took off it and didn’t cut any of the brackets off, as I wanted to make sure that the next person who takes the bike on could return it to standard if they wanted.”

A friend with far more experience in classics, Viv Crowley, who owns V-Moto Ltd, said he had never seen anyone café race a Norton Navigator before, and it seems unlikely that many did, even back in the 1960s. The letters pages of Motorcycle Mechanics from the period would include missives from young readers asking how to café race such machines, and the advice was almost always to sell it and buy something more suitable.