John Keogh – designer for hire
The designer and illustrator behind some of the world’s most striking motorcycles
You’ll have seen his designs – the Buell Firebolt and Lightning, the carbonmonocoque Taylormade Moto2 racer, Honda’s ‘EvoBlade’ or even a multitude of MCN ‘artist impressions’ – but you’re less likely to be aware this diverse portfolio is the work of one man: leading British motorcycle designer and consultant John Keogh. Compared to designers such as Piaggio’s Miguel Angel Galluzzi or (until last month) MV’s Adrian Morton, John’s career stands out for not just the variety of his output – from illustrations to completed road bikes and racers – but also for the diversity of his clients, from manufacturers to specials’ builders and race teams. He’s always preferred to work as a ‘hired gun’. After college, ambitions in automotive design took him to specialist courses first in Switzerland then Coventry before starting work in the early 1990s with John Mockett. Mockett is one of the most celebrated British bike designers/illustrators of the 80s and 90s, produced MCN’s Sprocket cartoon strip from 1974 and worked on everything from Yamaha’s LC to the Hesketh and Sheene and Roberts race liveries. In the early 90s he worked for Triumph, styling all the early bikes, most famously the T595 Daytona, assisted by Keogh.
“He was freelance, so I took a note of how he did it,” says Keogh today. “I worked with John on the Daytona and what became the Speed Triple after John Bloor famously said ‘Bloody hell, it looks like you’ve crashed it…’.”
Keogh also started doing ‘artists impressions’ to go with MCN news stories. “They were great because you could draw what you wanted. Nobody was going to say ‘You’ve got to build it now’…”
An association with Paul Taylor of Taylormade Racing in California, plus Brook Henry of Ducati specialists Vee Two in Australia, gave Keogh a taste of foreign travel and cemented his nomadic style. Then Buell came knocking.
“I took the Vee Two Squalo to the Paris show and met one of H-D’s top guys. Erik Buell had already come up with this idea of a fuel-in-frame sportsbike, but they were stuck and this guy dragged me in saying it’s a European bike so should have European input. I ended up working with Erik for three or four years…” After that came TVS in India and more, with the Vee Two Hailwood Replica his most recent co-creation
‘Bloor said it looked like we’d crashed it…’
– all on a freelance basis.
“I was offered a job at Harley but I didn’t want to relocate my young family to Wisconsin. I also had more chance of doing my own thing by staying independent. I’ve enjoyed being what you’d call a ‘jobbing freelancer’. Instead of being stuck with one manufacturer I got to travel the world, play with bits of foam and end up at race tracks…”
And the highlight was a racer in every sense – the Taylormade Carbon2 Moto2 bike. A pure prototype racer with a carbon monocoque chassis, BMW Teleleverstyle front-end, carbon swingarm and rear-mounted ducted radiator. “When the FIM announced Moto2 I was at Laguna Seca with Taylormade. We arranged a meeting with one of the head guys at the FIM, said we were interested and it seemed like a way of ‘doing a Britten’ and yet the hard part, the engine, was done for you.
“By the time we got if off the ground Moto2 had already been going a year and a half, and we went to the Indianapolis GP to try to sell the idea to a number of teams. They said ‘Oh, very interesting and we like you guys,’ but most of them had already committed to Suter or Kalex. So we’d already missed the boat and it was also too innovative, they couldn’t risk their sponsors or riders on anything unconventional.”