Adrian Sellers, behind the scenes

New Jersey native Adrian Sellers, 43, is the man responsible for creating Royal Enfield’s twin-cylinder custom models. After nine years at Yamaha’s Design Laboratory in Los Angeles, then four years with Honda R&D in Italy, he was appointed Enfield’s Head of Custom and Motorsport in 2016, based at the Bruntingthorpe UK Technology Centre. He tells us how this second variant in Royal Enfield’s twin-cylinder 650 custom club came about.

“In my previous roles I did a lot of research into the custom scene, to keep abreast of styling trends, and so on. Custom bikes are pieces of artwork that you can do one-off crazy stuff with that wasn’t done before, which can then be brought into the mainstream. I became very interested in it as a function of research and, at Royal Enfield, I was able to have direct participation in the segment.

When we created the 650 motor, we knew this was going to be a good basis for a lot of bikes. Before I joined Royal Enfield they’d started to put together this multi-year, multi-model plan for the future, and that’s what we’re executing now.

Pretty much as soon as I joined, we started conceptualising the Shotgun alongside the Super Meteor – they share the same frame and central packaging, so we look at all the models together so that we end up with the best possible and most distinct result for each one. Because if you finish work on one, and then try to do another in sequence, the ones that follow on are always compromised.

The Shotgun was a bit of a gamble for us, and we weren’t quite sure we should go ahead with it until relatively recently, as it’s not directly linked to any of our historical models. That represents risk, and frankly we’re just hoping that we’ve taken the customer with us on this one. It’s a Custom, which is to say it’s a one-off that’s not linked to any one category - it sits as very much its own thing. I heard you calling it a Hotrod, and I think that’s a pretty good way of putting it.

The whole venture started out as a bit of an experiment, and when you do something that deviates from a very strong core – in our case, a very retro core – the company gets a bit nervous, because we don’t know how it’s going to land.

We like it, but it doesn’t mean everybody else will! So we put out the SG650 concept and gauged the response, which was massively favourable, so we went ahead.

It’s not as much of an issue now that we’re actually releasing the bike, but whenever we unveiled one of our other models in the intervening period, we’d always get at least one comment of: ‘When’s the Shotgun coming out?’ That was a really great thing for us to see, and it gave us a lot of encouragement to take a bit of a risk.

Despite not being part of our history, we’re still hoping that people will be able to see a bit of a newer edge to Royal Enfield in the bike.

It has performance overtones just by the muscular way in which it’s presented – we want to make things look a little badass every once in a while! That’s our prerogative as designers – we can’t help ourselves producing such designs! But I think if we’re saying it’s muscular, that doesn’t necessarily make it a Cruiser or a Roadster or anything; it’s important for it to have its own identity. So despite using the same frame as the Meteor, the footrest position is massively different, for that really confident, upright seating position. The handlebar’s quite flat to get that muscular little bit of a Dragster feeling to it, keeping it nice and low. The bike sits low to the ground, too, so lean angle is a little restricted compared to a sports bike – it’s not a full Roadster, so you’ll touch down the footrests earlier, but you’ll also touch down a lot later than on a Cruiser, so again, it’s that balance.

A lot of people are going to have a ton of fun on the Shotgun, because they’ll feel like a hero riding it – you’ll leave a trail of sparks going round corners.

I think our Chief of Design has already fully worn away the hero tabs and some of the footpeg on one of our prototype bikes he’s been riding. And they’re flip-up footrests, but that hasn’t stopped him, though!”