Dr Joe and the EMC 350
From humble beginnings, prewar, to a racing force opined and applauded by some of the purest racers on the planet. Dr Joe Ehrlich emigrated from Austria to the UK in the 1930s and set about making the first in a long line of exquisite race bikes. Here’s the story – and the rideable rid 1938 beginnings of it all.
In 1948 the Grand Prix world was changed by a small bike that showed everyone the way to go – even if it never made it to the grid, proper.
While struggling to establish the fledgling bike business he’d founded in 1946, Joe Ehrlich developed a water-cooled EMC split-single, two-stroke GP racer. That motorcycle was born with a ladepumpe supercharging piston. It was a design clearly based on the prewar DKW factory racer with which Germany’s Ewalde Kluge won the 1938 Isle of Man Lightweight TT – the first nonBritish bike/rider combo to do so.
Fitted in a twin-loop frame with girder fork and plunger rear suspension, in the hands of all-rounder road racing and scrambles star Les Archer, the 250cc EMC won the prestigious Hutchinson 100 held at Britain’s first postwar national race meeting at Dunholme Lodge Airfield just outside Lincoln in 1947.
Buoyed by that success, Ehrlich produced a 350cc version of the bike, now with Dowty telescopic fork but still a plunger rear end, which Don Crossley rode in the 1947 Manx GP. However, such was the supercharged motor’s prodigious thirst that it ran out of fuel on the Mountain on lap three en route to a planned single fuel stop for the six-lap race. Oops.
So for 1948, Ehrlich completely redesigned the motorcycle, with a much larger five-gallon (22.5-litre) fuel tank atop a revised tubular steel duplex frame with a cast aluminium backbone and steering head unit carrying an inverted 1½inch (38 mm) Dowty oleo-pneumatic telescopic fork – yes, an upside-down fork in 1948!
At the rear there was now a tubular steel swingarm with twin Dowty shocks – again, oleo-pneumatic. The revised engine was now fully water-cooled, and claimed to produce 40bhp at 5,500rpm, compared to the 32bhp at 7,000rpm of the new, more conventional AJS 7R ‘Boy’s Racer’ sohc four-stroke, which was also 6kg heavier than the 130kg/285lb twostroke – though probably slightly lighter when fully fuelled.
So, to stop what by prewar DKW standards undoubtedly had the potential to be a very fast bike, Ehrlich had produced beautifully cast aluminium conical hubs housing EMC’S own Sls/single leading-shoe drum brakes, an 8.00in/203mm front and 7.00in/178mm rear, both housed in 20-inch wheels with Borrani aluminium rims.
The new EMC was entered for the 1948 Junior TT to be ridden by Archer – but at the behest of the newly-formed FICM (the FIM’S predecessor) the ACU returned Ehrlich’s entry form just six weeks before the race, stating that the EMC infringed the FICM’S recent ban on supercharging introduced in April that year for all international events. Joe spent a lot of time contesting this decision, but ultimately failed to get it reversed, thus making his purposeful-looking new 350 GP model obsolete overnight – just like another later stillborn Italian victim of bureaucratic chicanery, the 1969 V4 Villa 250.
The single such EMC 350 Grand Prix racer constructed was then sold to a friend of Ehrlich’s named Wally Walters, who rode it on the street, apparently very happily for a year before selling it back to Dr Joe.
It then languished in the workshop of his palatial Hertfordshire mansion for the next four decades before he sold it, together with five
other EMCS of various types representing his own personal collection, to the irrepressible Sammy Miller for display in his eponymous Museum on Britain’s South Coast. This EMC corner includes a sectioned split-single engine plus a showcase display of its dual-conrod layout, seeing which makes this somewhat improbable format more understandable, as well as Ehrlich’s claims that it delivered enhanced control of the transfer and exhaust ports, improved port timing, and better volumetric efficiency.
On acquisition in the late 1980s the watercooled 346cc EMC was completely restored to full working order by Sammy’s recently retired mechanical magician Bob Stanley, who reports that it was “a basket case, but fortunately complete!” when it arrived at the museum. Over a six-month period he completely rebuilt the engine and four-speed Burman gearbox, with new pistons, bearings and oil seals, and refurbished the frame. The result is an undeniably handsome looking motorcycle, albeit with its avant-garde front suspension and unique mechanical package sitting slightly ill at ease with the plank-like seat. But the chance to ride it around the access roads of the museum
estate revealed a bike that’s impressively modern in its behaviour, as well as surprisingly flexible and forgiving at lower speeds.
The EMC’S split-single piston-port twostroke water-cooled engine measuring 50x88mm (times two) features sandcast aluminium crankcases surmounted by a vertical cast-iron six-stud cylinder block containing tandem-twin bores holding a pair of long-skirted (111mm rear and 99mm front) Specialloid pistons, each with three compression rings – unusually for a two-stroke, which nowadays would have only one. These are mounted on an articulated dual conrod assembly running on caged roller crankpin bearings, with the crankshaft carried in ball and roller main bearings. With the forward cylinder having three transfer ports, there are two inlet ports and twin exhausts in the rear bore, with the straight megaphone exhausts running directly rearwards from the cylinder block.
By dint of the exhaust ports opening and closing earlier than the transfer ports, this gives improved mixture distribution as well as exhaust scavenging, compared to conventional single-cylinder two-strokes.
The engine’s single 14mm sparkplug is
positioned in the front of the common-toboth-bores nine-stud aluminium cylinder head, over the front piston. So with the rear piston travelling in the bore ahead of its forward partner, it opens the exhaust ports well in advance of the transfer piston opening its ports, hence the optimised scavenging of the exhaust gasses. But then, still leading, it shuts the exhaust port while the transfer is still open, minimising the loss of the fresh inlet charge thanks to the asymmetric timing.
However, induction is optimised by the fitment of a large-diameter ladepumpe pumping piston measuring 130 x 40mm which faces forward at right angles to the ‘working’ pistons. The crown of this piston faces inwards, and it’s driven by two slim conrods mounted on large-diameter eccentric attachments to the outer surfaces of each crankshaft web, with the small ends located into pockets machined in the piston crown.
The suction stroke draws extra mixture into the expanding crankcase volume, and the delivery stroke pressurises the crankcase before shooting the mixture through the three transfer ports. The engine is sparked by a Lucas magneto chain-driven off the crank, and is mated to a four-speed Burman gearbox via a chain primary drive and a dry clutch.
Once warm, the EMC push-starts as easily as a conventional two-stroke, with a wall of sound denoting that it’s ready for action. Kluge’s DKW could reportedly be heard in Liverpool descending Bray Hill on the TT Course, and even if that’s apocryphal the similar EMC is indeed very loud. Yet despite this it seems pretty modern in its behaviour, with the light-action dry clutch feeding out easily to obtain forward motion via the Burman transmission’s rather heavy one-down/three-up rightfoot gearchange. The 8,000rpm Smiths revcounter wasn’t working, but the splitsingle motor seemed amazingly flexible, allowing me if I wished to select top gear at around 25mph, then crack the throttle wide open to get a far from sluggish drive towards the horizon – especially once the engine starts to pick up revs faster from what Bob Stanley told me was is 4,000rpm upwards, before peaking out at 5,500rpm when it’s best to hunt for a higher gear.
Besides the twin 11⁄ 8in/ 28.5mm Amal carbs, the throttle also controls the flow of lubricant via a Pilgrim pump from the small oil tank under the seat to the main bearings and rear cylinder wall, whereby the wider the throttle opening the greater the flow of lubricant from the pump. Nevertheless, Bob Stanley told me he ran 50:1 premix in the fuel “just to be on the safe side”!
The EMC’S engine is very smooth, even at higher revs, with no real hint of vibration even cranked wide open in the gears. But do that, and you can’t escape consuming fuel at a prodigious rate, hence the big pistolshaped fuel tank I could warp my arms around at speed. The bulk of the tank belied the EMC’S compact 54in/1370mm wheelbase – this is really quite a small-seeming bike when you straddle at rest, except for that hefty tank which has nevertheless been cleverly developed to hide its extra real estate well. The use of 20in wheels is paradoxical
proof of the EMC’S vintage era ancestry, and I will admit to treating the ancient front Firestone with a good deal of suspicion, so keeping up turn speed wasn’t really an option. But that upside-down Dowty fork did a reasonable job of ironing out the bumps in the short test track I was using, though it was a bit bouncy – I think they still had a bit to learn about rebound damping back in 1948.
There was better compliance from the twin-shock rear end, once Bob Stanley had topped up the air pressure to 20psi. Those good looking brakes actually worked pretty well, too – with minimal engine braking from the two-stroke motor, you’d need good brakes, and EMC would seem to have obliged, though there was better bite from the smaller 7in SLS rear than from the larger 8in SLS front – maybe thanks to pad choice?
The split-single design and the porting chosen by Ehrlich resulted in a pretty torquey engine, and this, coupled with the heavy flywheels, makes the 350cc EMC unexpectedly nice to ride. You can cut down on gear-changing because of this, and the engine has a level of grunt that’s quite unexpected for a racing two-stroke of any era, making it pretty docile at low rpm. But get it wound up hard and it certainly flies, accompanied by that raucous exhaust note. You’d need to wear earplugs to ride this in a two-hour TT race, or risk losing your hearing for life.
was a major challenge, let alone convincing a conservative public weaned on pushrod ohv singles that a split-single two-stroke had any merit.the only previous British application of such a unique engine design, invented by Italian engineer Adalberto Garelli back in 1913, had been in the obscure 1920s 1488cctrojan car, before it was picked up first by Puch, then by DKW.
However, Joe Ehrlich was one of life’s survivors for whom the glass was always half-full, and he gradually upped EMC production to 10 bikes a week, with several exported to Scandinavia, Australia and South Africa, before the company’s March 1953 demise.
The previous year, the first normally aspirated Puch-engined EMC racers had appeared in the 125cc class, with works rider F H Burman finishing 6th in the Ultra-lightweighttt, team-mate Noel Mavrogordato 9th and customer entries 11th and 12th – though John Surtees crashed Dr Joe’s works EMC on his 1953 Isle of MANTT debut, when the forks collapsed at speed, leaving him with a broken wrist.
After the Mini car was launched in 1959, Ehrlich left BMC (as Austin had now become) to work for the De Havilland aircraft company, heading up its small engines division.
“One day at a De Havilland board meeting in 1960 the chairman turned to me and said ‘Joe, you might just as well do it out in the open – we all know what you’re up to!’ “recalled Ehrlich.
“‘It’ was developing my first rotary-valve 125GP racing machine, which I’d built in a corner of the factory. De Havilland’s came up with enough backing to enable me to build a team of bikes and go racing. We never won a world championship grand prix, but we came very close with Mike Hailwood, Rex Avery (a De Havilland employee),
Paddy Driver, Derek Minter and Phil Read riding for me, before I packed up in 1964 – we just couldn’t keep up with the
Japanese on the budget we were working on.
“When I had six-speed gearboxes, they had eight; when I built an eight-speed, they produced one with 10 or
12 ratios. When I had a single, they raced twins; when I made a twin they already had fours.
So I decided enough was enough – with the budget I had then, it was impossible to compete against them effectively.”
However, none other than Mike Hailwood rode an EMC to fifth place in the 1962 125GP world championship in between winning the 500cc world title in his first year riding for MV Agusta, beating all the Suzuki and MZ factory riders in doing so, and bested only by the four-rider Honda team. Mike also defeated that year’s world champion, his former team-mate Luigitaveri on his factory Honda, to win the non-championship Saar GP in Germany on the British bike. Not bad for a spare time project.
What about the oft-expressed view that those 125 EMCS that finished on several GP rostrums, and often beat the works Suzukis that came to dominate the class, were just East German MZS wearing EMC tank badges?
“Well, partly it’s true,” the Doc admitted, “because while I was at BMC I’d worked closely with [MZ chief engineer] Waiter Kaaden in my spare time. In fact, I helped them win the Italian GP at Monza in 1959, which was their first big breakthrough, and afterwards they thanked me
publicly at the celebration dinner. I helped MZ, and they helped me – my first 125 engine was built on an MZ crankcase which they gave me, because they didn’t want to build the water-cooled bike I insisted was necessary. It never raced with the MZ bottom end because the power I was getting was too much for that, so I had to make my own – but even when we were racing against each other, we always had first-class relations.”
In 1965 De Havilland was taken over by RollsRoyce, which closed the company’s small engine division, leaving Ehrlich redundant.
After founding his own R&D factory unit at Bletchley (former home of the Secondworld War’s Enigma code breakers), Dr Joe went to work for US outboard engine manufacturers Evinrude and Johnson, helping them win a string of world powerboat titles. At the same time he got involved in Formula 3 car racing, while working for British Leyland as a consultant, and developing the range of diamond tool
It’s a pity after riding it that the 350cc EMC never reached the starting grid, because with its swinging-arm rear suspension with twin telescopic shocks when others were using plungers (and the KTT Velocette which won the first two 350cc World Championships at GP level had a rigid rear end), its upside-down tele fork (the Velocette had girders), it was a design which looked forward rather than back. But it would take another 20 years before twostrokes of a very different type began to dominate race grids around the world, and a quarter-century before Agostini won the first world title for a stroker in his debut 1975 season with Yamaha.
The stillborn EMC seems a true crossroads bike with the potential to be successful, as witnessed by Archer’s Hutchinson 100 race victory the year before its creation. But the rule book prevented Joe Ehrlich from ever demonstrating his design’s values, and it would take him until the early 1960s and his de Havilland-backed 125cc rotary-valve singles before EMC became a winning brand.
Today, his 350GP racer lives on as a testament to his drive and inventiveness in always looking ahead to the next step in development, as someone perpetually dissatisfied with the status quo.
Promise unfulfilled? Yes – but another step on the path to building a better two-stroke. patents through his own separate company whose royalties underpinned the eventual EMC motorcycle GP comeback.
For the next 10 years from 1969 onwards Ehrlich went car racing with varying degrees of success, with future Formula 1 world champion Jody Scheckter driving for him in 1971. But in 1981 Dr Joe returned to the bike world, linking with the British Waddon GP team to race in 250 GPS with the Rotax tandem-twin rotary-valve engine.
He tuned this to good effect, with Irishman Con Law winning the Isle of Man 250TT on an Ehrlich-tuned Waddon, before the team fell apart, wracked by internal dissension. But this encouraged Ehrlich to revive the EMC name by building his own bikes for 1983, just as he was finishing off a successful project for British Leyland to design and develop a three-cylinder car engine that yielded 110mph and 60mpg, fitted to an Austin Allegro saloon. At the same time, his 14-year flirtation with F3 car racing with Ehrlichtuned Ford andtoyota engines came to an end. Time to return full-time to his first love of bikes.
“Things got difficult at Waddon’s, and there were financial problems too, so I baled out in October 1982,” Dr Joe told me. “I sold off all my car racing equipment to raise funds and clear space at my Bletchley works, worked night and day with a couple of people for two months to build a pair of new bikes, and had them ready for the Racing Bike Show in December – a 125 single and a 250 twin, both with Rotax engines I tuned myself.
“The first time the 250 turned a wheel in
anger was at Daytona in March 1983, when Con Law finished third out of 120 entries on his first visit there.” Proof this was no fluke came in June on the Isle of Man, when Law scorched to a record-breaking Juniortt victory at 108.09mph on sponsor Jim Millar’s EMC.THIS success set the seal on Ehrlich’s return to bike racing, and gave him the incentive to search for those elusive sponsors to fund a full-scale GP return.
But while Aussie Graeme Mcgregor won the 1984 Lightweighttt on an EMC, Joe Ehrlich had to dig into his own pocket to fund the occasional GP appearances that year of EMC’S works rider, Andywatts – though he must have thought it worthwhile whenwatts led the first lap of the British GP at Silverstone, and finished a close second to Christian Sarron’s worksyamaha.this eventually led to Pepsi-cola funding a full season with Donnie Mcleod in 1987 with a new Harrisframed EMC, powered by an Ehrlich-tuned Rotax tandem-twin motor.
“Dr Joe provided a better engine than the Armstrong I’d raced before,” said Mcleod, “and I got on well with him, too, even if he was certainly different from anyone else in the GP paddock. He gave me a plaque with his motto on it, which read ‘I’m only stubborn when I don’t get my own way!’ That summed him up – but he certainly knew how to tune engines.”
The Pepsi EMC team’s debut season was a development one, with a series of DNFS and lowly finishes, and just a pair of ninth places in the French and Swedish GPS on the board. But a 1-2 EMC victory by Eddie Laycock and Brian Reid
in the Lightweighttt, plus Mcleod’s dominant victories in the end-of-season Silverstone and Donington Nationals, augured well for the coming year, and Donnie madethe Doc a happy man in 1988.
With Pepsi transferring its eponymous sponsorship to the factory Suzuki 500cc team, it rebranded the EMC as a 250GP class presence for its 7-Up subsidiary, and were rewarded with a series of solid points-scoring finishes by the Scotsman, en route to 12th place in the world championship as top privateer on the leading Rotax-powered bike – one place ahead of Loris Reggiani’s similarly-powered works Aprilia.
But that 1988 season was Dr Joe’s bike racing swansong, and at the end of the year he gave up his quixotic struggle against the factory teams, with Mcleod’s point-scoring 15th place finish in the last GP of the year in Brazil marking the final appearance of an EMC in GP racing.
It was fashionable for some to dismiss Joe Ehrlich as an eccentric charlatan driven by a combination of unbridled self-esteem, and a thirst for publicity. “The Doc reckons he invented the two-stroke engine shortly after dreaming up the wheel,” said one such detractor, before grudgingly allowing that bike racing needed flamboyant characters like Dr Joe, with his debonair quirkiness and penchant for a refreshing glass of Moet champagne in the heat of the GP paddock.
Such a patronising view denied what was perhaps Joe Ehrlich’s most significant contribution to the world of road racing – for although Suzuki’s PR machine has always claimed the credit for introducing the first major non-tobacco multinational sponsor to GP bike racing in 1988, in fact it was Dr Joe who’d broken the ice by persuading Pepsi-cola into motorcycle sport by backing the EMC team one year earlier, in 1987.
Credit where credit’s due…..