ROTARY’S RETURN!
Elsewhere in this issue you’ll see the heritage of a very special range of racing machines – the rotary racers – that graced the tracks and paddocks of the UK in the 1980s and early 90s.
These amazing bikes may have been a tad dubious on the rules/ regulations front, depending on your outlook as to how the rotary’s capacity was measured, but you can’t deny the impact they had. Not only in sound, speed and outright sexiness, but they also took a British title in 1994 with Ian Simpson aboard, as well as that memorable 1992 Senior TT win.
This machine you see before you is the ultimate in the line of rotary racers. Yet again developed by Brian Crighton – the man behind the original machines – these are a track-only limited run.
The Crighton CR700W is a twin-rotor fuel-injected 690cc rotary, with a Spondon frame weighing just 129 kilos and producing 220bhp. This initial machine is going to be ‘incredibly collectible’, according to the distributor Paul Jayson, from The Motorcycle Broker.
Paul says: “The first machines will be a run of 25 signed by Brian Crighton and hand-built by him for track use only. Of the 25, 10 have been sold already and the remaining 15 are available at present for £95,000 + VAT which is £114,000 including UK mainland delivery.”
Apparently, the Crighton motorcycle brand is owned by Rotron Power who have been involved in developing the rotary engine for over 12 years for use in aeronautics. They’ve created a centrally liquid-cooled shaft for the rotors to run on and developed a new exhaust system that creates a vacuum to draw heat away from the rotor tips which makes these motors hugely reliable.
So reliable, that they run 1000 ‘air miles’ at full speed for 1000 hours. Rotron have been working with Brian Crighton for over a decade and the motors are so good that they have MOD contracts and export their motors worldwide. You can read more about the tech here www. crightonmotorcycles.com/themachine for more on buying one of these machines, go to: www. themotorcyclebroker.co.uk