boat engined bike
After Kim Newcombe’s tragic passing, and his funeral in Northampton, Rodtingate returned the trio of bikes taken to Britain – a 350, 500 and 680 – to the König factory in Berlin.
On his visit to the Berlin factory, and while returning New Zealander Kim Newcombe's machinery, Dieter König offered Rod the Kiwi racer's position in the development department, as well as the works 500GP ride using a bike incorporating all the modifications that Kim and Rod had determined would be needed to stay competitive in 1974. These included lighter and better disc brakes, magnesium wheels, an aluminium radiator etc. But after politely declining the offer, Rod ended up working briefly for Yamaha Europe in Amsterdam, before heading home to Melbourne, where, after some years with the local Yamaha importer, he established Tingate Racing and quickly gained a reputation for superb workmanship in crafting monocoque chassis, aluminium tanks, expansion chambers and the like.
However, his König days weren’t done.
“A year or so after Kim’s accident, Dieter sent me a motor to look at continuing development with, and I bought a Quaife gearbox to go with it,” says Rod. “I looked at it and thought how the front exhaust came over the top of the carburettor which heats up the intake charge, and how if you ran two pipes out of the bottom and the back two out of the top, it would work out better.
“You could get reasonable pipes underneath, and run an airbox down through the centre. But, the trouble was König was only a small factory, and Dieter just didn’t have the dollars to make new casting dies to revamp the engine, so it just sort of sat there for a while, then got tucked away under a bench when König shut down after Dieter’s death.”
In the meantime, his mate Peter Smith had bought a collection of parts from the König factory, including wheels, a radiator, fuel tank, seat and other parts – so eventually the idea came about to build a replica of the Newcombe bike as a tribute to Kim. And that tribute would use these bits from
Peter and Rod’s motor.
“Kim’s own bikes had all been disassembled, and the engines used by the hydroplane racers,” says Tingate. “I spoke to Dieter years later, and he was sad that had happened. He and Kim were great like-minded friends, and he wished he’d kept at least one bike all together, to act as a memorial to Kim at the factory.
“There are various bikes all claiming to be Kim’s old one, but I’m sorry to say it’s simply not true – all three bikes he raced were broken up. I saw one at a Hockenheim classic meeting painted to look like it was Kim Newcombe’s, but it was a real dirty-looking old thing, and certainly not Kim’s bike. It had different brakes on it; different fairing brackets – you had to have worked on it as I did to know what’s genuine, and none of them I’ve seen are.
“This one that I’ve built is more accurate than anything else I’ve seen – not that it’s such a big deal anyway. Kim’s bikes have gone, same as him, so let’s just rejoice in what he achieved with them.”
So, in the 1990s, Rod began work on replicating Kim’s racer. He had the original factory drawings for the spine frame, and had just completed casting and machining a batch of replica Ceriani front brakes for sale to classic racers. Gradually, the other components came together – Janeen Newcombe even had a batch of the original decals, including the pattern for the little Kiwi emblem on the tail fairing which Rod had hand-cut himself for the 1973 Dutch TT.
Alongside replica brakes, Rod built a new frame and swingarm, expansion chambers, handlebars and other fittings. The glass fibre fuel tank and fairing moulds were taken from original components Peter Smith obtained from König, but the seat is an original one.
By 2007 the replica was finally completed, since when Rod has ridden it frequently in New Zealand, as well as in Australia.
One such occasion was at the annual Broadford Bike Bonanza festival of twowheeled sport, run each Easter weekend, at which he generously threw me the keys of the boat-engined bike for a dozen laps of the 1.3 mile switchback Broadford road racing circuit north of Melbourne.
It’s not a long circuit but it does have a decent top straight which allowed the bike to pull out and pass a factory MV Agusta 500 triple, to stretch its legs. I must admit that doing so helped answer a 40-year-old question I’ve been pondering ever since I used to race against Brian Wackett’s so-distinctive 500 König in unlimited-class UK racing back in the late Seventies on my P&M Kawasaki TT1: What’s like to ride a König? Well, now I know…
The yellow and black Tingate-built König is a stunning looking bike which bears ample testimony to Rod's superb workmanship. Long, low and relatively lean thanks to the lack of any carbs jutting out from the side of the
engine as on more conventional rotary-valve motors, it has an extremely stretched-out riding position that’s also improbably cramped, with just a 380mm/15in gap between the 780mmhigh seat base and the raised footrests.
Seeing as how motocrosser-turned road racer Kim Newcombe was a lofty 6ft 2in, it’s amazing that this exact replica of his bike – which Rodtingate insists it is, and he’s in a unique position to know – could have been comfortable enough for him to survive the hour-long GP races of the era.
But since, in his relatively short road racing career, Kim never rode any other motorcycle than a König, he probably learned to put up with it – not diffifi fficult when you’re finishing on the podium, I suppose…
Riding the König
One advantage of having two cylinders firing together on the flat-four motor’s 180º crank is that the König fires up almost immediately
after a couple of steps, or in my case (and presumably Kim’s, too?) a short paddle. No wonder he was first awway so often in those days of dead-engine race starts, even ahead of the past master of push-starting, Giacomo Agostini.
Once under way I levere ed my feet onto the rests, tucked dowwn in the seat, and found I had to reach out quuite some way along the huge 26.6 litre fu uel tank to the not excessively dropped cliponsc – the König may have been a litttle lighter than the MV Agustas, but its thhirst meant that much of that saving wwas handed straight back again by the weight of the fuel load.
I’m a bit shorter than Kim was, but I still couldn’t tuck my knees into the sculptured tank indents thanks to those high footre ests – no wonder Kim rode with his knees sticking out everywhere, thought I suppose if you have poweer to spare over the opposition, you ca an afford to do that!
The closeness of the fivve-speed Quaife gearbox’s shell to yyour right foot delivers a crisp, precise onne-up/four- down race-pattern shift action thanks to the short lever travel. On the opposite side I only troubled the Ceriani rear 2 LS drum brake lever just twice per lap, to stop from hard in top gear at the end of Broadford’s twot straights, while zapping down through thee gears to second provided some extra enginne braking when I let out the clutch again after doing so.
Elsewhere, just using the 4LS front drum with its wider-than-normal brake shoes on its own did the trick. I was impressed by how well the front Ceriani brake worked – it had good bite, without being snatchy. Japanese discs of the era weren’t as effective, just lighter, and cast iron Brembo discs wouldn’t have meant much of a weight saving.
Doing that also helped keep up turn speed, by modulating the braking and loading up the front wheel via weight transfer. But this came without excessive fork dive thanks to Rod Tingate’s good set-up of the 35mm Ceriani fork, which as I know from my days racing with one in the Isle of MANTT and other bumpy tracks, is very susceptible to the grade and quantity of oil you install.
On the König, this let me keep up turn speed in places like the off- camber left leading onto Broadford’s pit straight, or the uphill righthander at the other end of it, where it rode the bumps on the apex really well. However, the extra torque of the 680 motor meant I had to take care not to lift the front wheel while still cranked over uphill by getting too eager with my right hand for a good drive onto the straight.
I hadn’t ridden the König’s 18in Bridgestone Battlax tyres for quite a while, not since the last of my excursions to Japan to race Classics at Tsukuba or Sugo, but I quickly remembered how trustworthy they are, with excellent grip and surprisingly good feedback from the front one.
This was important, since as I started to feel at home on the König, I recognised that its low-slung format made it a two-stroke version of the horizontal-cylinder Ducati Supermono I enjoyed racing so much 25 years ago – also a bike with a stretched-out stance thanks to its creator Pierre Terblanche being even taller than Kim Newcombe!
The reduced frontal area of such bikes result in a more aerodynamic architecture, the benefits of which it’s up to you to maximise as best you can – as Kim apparently did by passing Pagani’s MV in a straight line at the German GP. Plus, the lower cee of gee this delivers increased stability over rough surfaces compared to the taller, upright-cylinder opposition. So Kim would have kept up turn speed in fast, bumpy bends like Monza’s Curvone or Blanchimont at Spa, where others would have had to ease the throttle to recover a tank-slapper – a key edge in GP races staged on the bumpy public roads courses of the era.
The König is a confidence-inspiring ride, and I had proof of this each lap at Broadford when I hit the big bump descending the ‘staircase’ on the top straight. The König would just flick the ‘bars once and instantly resume normal service, without my grappling with the steering to stop the wheel flapping, or backing off the throttle. Also, the stretched-out stance helped load the front wheel with my body weight, so keeping up turn speed was easier, like in the horseshoe right-hander behind the paddock.
The flat-four König motor with its big-bang firing order was utterly smooth, even if the
gruff exhaust note from having a double- up dose of combustion led me to expect otherwise – it sounds like it ought to vibrate, like a two-up British parallel-twin four-stroke does, but it doesn’t, which would have made it a less tiring ride in an hour-long GP, but I doubt I could have supported for that long getting my right inside leg toasted to a turn by the rear cylinders’ unprotected expansion chamber exhaust, the fat part of which is right next to the seat.
The opposite side isn’t so painful, because the front exhaust has slimmed down to stinger diameter by the time it reaches the seat – but it’s still a surprise to hear Rodtingate insist that Newcombe never fitted heat shields to the exhausts on any of his Königs. Why ever not, I wonder – or maybe it was because with the low seat and high footrests he never tucked his legs in at all, just rode with the knees splayed out.
Unfortunately the Kröber tacho fitted to the König was playing up at Broadford, reading half the true revs – but on that basis the German two-stroke motor was amazingly tractable, as well as super-torquey, pulling hard from as low as 4000rpm and running strongly all the way to my 9000 rev shift point (it’s safe to 10,000 revs, said Rod), without falling off the pipe, nor asking you to finger the clutch lever to coax it back into the powerband exiting any of the tight turns in the Broadford infield. It seemed remarkably forgiving, not only by two-stroke standards, but many a tuned four-stroke motor would have been peakier.
The König had heaps more torque than the ex-ginger Molloy Kawasaki H1R I’ve also ridden, which finished second to Ago in the
1970 500c world championship – those Kiwis were everywhere back then! I said as much to Rodtingate when I stopped in the pits – which is when he admitted, slightly shame-facedly, that, er, this was in fact a 680 König motor, not a 500. That explains everything!
“When Dieter said he was sending me the engine, I asked for a 680 because early on I thought I might race with it in Australia, and there wasn’t much point having a 500 if I was racing in the big class,” says Rod. “But that never happened, so while it’d be nice to have a bike just like the one Kim led the world championship on, I suppose as a tribute to him it’s better this way, since this is what he was riding when he had his crash. The two bikes were completely identical apart from the bore size in the engine.”
Well, the 680 König was always supposed to be a bit of a brute, but I suspect that might be because most customers used it for sidecar racing, where rideability is much less important that absolute power. Judging by the really great power delivery of the Tingate tribute bike, with its broad spread of bhp and ultra-torquey character, this had heaps of potential in solo form, too.
Rodtingate has made a lot of racing exhausts over the years for bikes, go-karts, hovercraft, chainsaws, mini-bikes, speedway cars, and powered hang-gliders – so I suspect that the pipes he’s concocted for the 680 König play a big part in making the bike so usable, while still so outstandingly fast in a straight line.
And does it ever accelerate – it was truly impressive how hard it got on the power
exiting the last turn onto the Pit straight at Broadford, accompanied by the totally unique but relatively lazy-sounding exhaust note. Yet there’s no narrow, fussy power band, just a progressive but overwhelming surge of power and especially torque as the revs rise rapidly towards that nine-grand peak. Just as well for its Japanese rivals that the 680 König could never have raced in Formula 750, since there was no road bike to derive the engine from.
Jack Findlay’s 694cc 1975 World F750 champion Yamahatz750 produced 120bhp at 10,500rpm, but weighed 157kg half dry, against the 110bhp the 120kg König was producing by then. QED?
Indeed, after finally riding a König 40 years after I had to race against them, my reaction is one of surprise. How come after Kim Newcombe showed how effective this design of engine was and how well it worked, coupled with its compact, ultra-rational build and light weight, did no other manufacturer ever copy the flat-four format in establishing the future direction of two-stroke engine design? Producing in-line fours with upright cylinders was so derivative – they’re just a four-stroke solution to a two-stroke question.
Stroker 500cc engines were a new frontier that all manufacturers were massed at the gates of in 1970 – and just because the Japanese, and Yamaha in particular, chose to follow convention in designing such motors, why did everyone else have to follow suit? Because the success of Kim Newcombe with the König flat-four was a signpost towards a different technical path that had the potential to be much better than the J-way. Too bad nobody else followed suit.
Technical view: From west of the wall
The horizontally-opposed liquid-cooled flat-four König hydroplane motor, first adapted to twowheeled land use in 1968, was the motorcycle world’s first four-cylinder two-stroke 500cc race engine.
It consisted of two vertically-split identical halves, bolted together to create a very low and relatively compact powerplant. The engine essentially comprised two twin-cylinder 250cc Boxer engines mounted side by side, and indexed at 180 degrees to each other, so that when looking at the front pair of cylinders there was one piston up, and the other down.
Likewise for the rear cylinders, so that two horizontally opposed cylinders on alternate sides fired simultaneously with each rotation of the five-piece built-up three-bearing Hoeckle crank, thus achieving perfect primary balance for much reduced vibration – as well as an early example of big-bang technology!
The crank layout saw each crankpin integral with its own full-circle flywheel, while the two central flywheels with the centre main web were machined from a single casting, with a split-type caged roller main bearing, while the timing side main was a double ball bearing, with two separate ball races supporting the drive side. All bearings in the motor were supplied by INA, the West German paragon of such components.
The Hoeckle conrods ran on caged roller bearing big ends, with crowded needle roller small ends on which the single-ring Mahle forged pistons were mounted. These had a large circular hole in the skirts through which some of the mixture passed to the crank chamber beneath, en route to the
“WHY DID NO OTHER MANUFACTURER EVER COPY THE FLATFOUR FORMAT IN ESTABLISHING THE FUTURE OF TWOSTROKE ENGINE DESIGN?”
combustion chamber. This so-called ‘third port’ in the König motor’s induction was first developed by MZ in neighbouring East Germany, and delivered better mixing of the fuel with enhanced scavenging during the exhaust phase, plus the flow of mixture through the pistons helped cool them, and to lubricate the small ends. Lubrication was via 5% (20:1) petroil mixture, with no separate oil pump as on the Kawasaki H1R.
This engine weighed just 37kg including the Solex carb, but not the magnesium water sump or transmission, and originally employed 56mm x 50mm dimensions for 493cc, before being replaced by a ‘square’ 54 x 54mm 495cc format for 1972. In the short-stroke guise it originally produced 68bhp at 9,000rpm at the crank in 1969 – around 40% more than the coomparable British singles then filling out thhe grids in 500GP racing – before eventually bbeing developed to produce a claimed 87bhp at 9800rpm at the crankshaft for the 1973 season, and was happy running to 10,500 revs. An overbored 54 x 54mm 674cc version – known as the König 680, and aimed primarily at sidecar use – was claimed to deliver 95bhp at 9500rpm, but with substantial extra torque in running safely to 10,000rpm. It’s worth noting that Agostini’s heavier threecylinder 500cc MV Agusta produced 78bhp at 12,000rpm at the gearbox in 1972, so around 85bhp at the crank.
The König motor’s paired cylinders, each with a single exhaust port and two transfer ports, originally featured pressed-in cast iron liners, but by 1973 these were replaced by Nikasil chromed alloy bores. Later in the 1970s, after various mods Dieter König managed to squeeze a peaky 130bhp from the 680 motor for a Speedway midget car, thus displaying his engine’s untapped potential if Kim Newcombe’s tragic death hadn’t ended his firm’s motorcycle R&D.
One of the inherent problems in adapting the König engine for motorcycle use was cooling it, with an external water pump driven off the right (timing) end of the crank by two light 2mm O-ring drive-belts. In outboard motor form, the engine was switched through 90º, so that the crankshaft was vertical to drive the propshaft, with the exhausts on one side and the carburettor on the other. This meant the motor was constantly showered by cold water, without which overheating was always a problem – the engine performed best at 60ºc, where peak power was obtained.
To ensure this, Kim Newcombe wouldn’t ever warm the engine up for a race, beyond starting it just once to make sure everything worked. Then he’d wheel it to the starting enclosure, and fire it up only for the warm-up lap. A partial solution was to bolt a finned magnesium sump to the crankcases holding two litres of coolant, and to mount a large capacity but rather heavy
copper-core brass radiator made locally in Berlin by Werner Noske up front – today’s aluminium radiators hadn’t yet been invented. This meant reversing the cylinders so that the stinger exhausts – one for each pair of cylinders, with siamesed headers – exited from the top rather than beneath the cylinders.
This, however, posed a further problem, for induction for all four cylinders was via a largediameter rotary valve made from 0.4mm thick stainless steel, mounted on the upper surface of the crankcase and driven off the crank’s right end by a 12mm toothed belt, rotated through 90º via a set of angled jockey pulleys. The asymmetric port timing this provided delivered a broader power band than with a concurrent piston-port two-stroke motor, but belt life was short – about one hour.
A twin-38mm choke Solex downdraught carburettor from a Porsche sat atop this valve to feed mixture from the 26.5 litre glass fibre fuel tank to the engine via a single diaphragm fuel pump operated via crankcase pressure. But space was very tight, and the close proximity of the forward exhaust pipe to the carb meant fuel vaporisation was often a problem.
This was later remedied when Newcombe obtained two 40mm Us-madetillotson diaphragm carbs which could be splayed outwards to reduce the effect on the incoming charge of the heat radiating off the front expansion chamber.
Ignition was provided via two sets of points operated directly by a crankshaft-mounted cam, which fired two twin-outlet coils, with a total-loss 12-volt battery mounted under the fibreglass seat.
Since König boat engines had no need of a gearbox, for motorcycle use a separate Norton/ AMC shell was fitttted with a multiplate steel/ sintered bronze dry clutch.
This shell was rotated more or less upside down so as to be tucked in close behind the rear pair of cylinders – making changing the rear cylinders’ sparkplugs a genuine feat of dexterity, necessitating a special flexible plug spanner to fit between the gearbox and the cylinder heads.
The Newcombe bike was fitted with a six-speed Austrian-made Schafleitner transmission, though many customers used the less costly five-speed Quaife Manx Norton gearbox. Power was transmitted to this via a Hy-vo Morse-type toothed-chain primary drive made by Westinghouse, with a rubber cushdrive mounted within the crankshaft sprocket.
This light, relatively compact and very low flat-four motor was suspended lengthways as a semi-stressed member in the Newcombedesigned frame, which featured a large 65mm-diameter steel backbone, with additional side rails and twin front motor supports. The 35mm Ceriani fork sat at a 26° head angle within König triple-clamps, and despite the lengthways Boxer engine format the wheelbase was a relatively contained 1430mm, via a box-section steel swingarm with twin Girling shocks adjustable only for spring preload.
But quite remarkably for 1973, the König frame had an adjustable swingarm pivot, which it took Honda another 25 years to finally adopt on its 500GP racers! However, on the König it was for another purpose besides the bonus of being able to alter the chassis geometry – for that was how you adjusted the chain tension, thanks to the fixed location for the rear axle!
Moreover, the whole frame had obviously been designed by someone who’d actually worked on the bike himself.
“By sticking a crate underneath the engine assembly, the complete rolling-chassis can be lifted off from above, leaving the engine ready to work on with easy access to everything,” says Rodtingate, according to whom by 1973 the König scaled 120kg with oil/water, but no fuel – against 148kg for a fully-faired Manx Norton single! More to the point, it was almost as light as Rod’s owntd3yamaha 350 twin which shared the König tent in GP paddocks.
“We didn’t like to let on how light it was,” says Rod, “So whenever we had to have it weighed, we’d make sure there was lots of fuel in the tank!” Ago’s MV-3 by contrast scaled 128kg dry.
For the 1973 season drum brakes were still fitted to the German bike, with a 230mm Ceriani four leading-shoe front brake with magnesium plates, and an equivalent twin leading-shoe rear. Discs all round were planned for 1974, had tragedy not intervened – but even without that the König 500 was a massively successful example of empirical engineering, achieved on the proverbial shoestring, by combining light weight and a powerful engine in what was self-evidently a good-handling package.
“König was a small factory trying to keep its head above water, and although the engine was not pretty, compared to the big-budget international motorcycle manufacturers of the time, Dieter König’s engine had the basic principles to make a great racing motorcycle,” says Rod.
“It had good bhp, it was light in weight, the engine had little vibration, it had crankcase cooling before it was thought of, it was narrow, it had a low centre of gravity, and a low frontal area.
“The big problem was that König was based in Berlin, then virtually an island in communist East Germany, and it could not source quality products or even materials easily, compared to West Germany.
“There were several alloy castings on the engine, including the block and waterpan, and these had to be sourced from the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR).
“East Germany was very poor, and the castings would come back with really bad porosity – not really ideal for any engine, let alone a 500GP race motor! Dieter would send the foundry top quality West German alloys, but they still came back porous, and I expect the foundry may have been swapping the alloys for their own East German materials, which must have been very frustrating for Dieter.”