The Life and Times of the Yellow Submarine
The Norton Commando Production Racer: More than a Café racer,
less than a GP bike.
When some wealthy collector finally builds the
ultimate motorcycle museum and designates one wing as the Hall of Influential
Motorcycles, it's not likely future visitors will see a Norton Commando
Production Racer there. By most of the accepted methods of the definition, the
bike simply wasn't that important, especially outside Great Britain. It began
life as a race-shop project, was launched as a marketing gimmick and, after a
brief spurt of dominance and popularity on the British and European racetracks,
went the way of other, suddenly uncompetitive racing machines. Which is to say,
into oblivion and numberless pieces.
And yet there exists reason to think otherwise of
the bike the British press instantly christened the "Yellow Submarine" on its
debut at the Racing and Sporting Motorcycle show in London in a freezing January
in 1971. The substance of the reason—bolstered by a healthy dose of 20/20
hindsight—is that the Commando Production Racer exists as one of, if not the
ultimate development of the motorcycle format the British were to stamp as
their own after World War II. This Production Racer a box-stock, genuine
factory-built device, not some "prodified" aftermarket machine could well be
considered the Ultimate British Vertical Twin.
Assuredly, there are Triumph Bon-nevilles being
sold as new even today. But even the most wide-eyed Bonnie fan will have to
admit that actual development of that machine stopped well before the workers'
co-op began building the bike in the mid-Seventies. Only Norton, of all the
British bike manufacturers, attempted to come to grips with the inherent
vibration of a big OHV vertical twin, and thus only Norton's Isolastic-framed
Commando, designed by Bob Trigg and launched in 1968, can be said to have
dragged the venerable old vertical twin into the postwar world. Thus by the
ineluctable process of logic, if the Commando street bike was the last word in
vertical twins from Britain, then the Production Racer was the exclamation point
at the end of the sentence. It was the fastest, best-handling, lightest and
quickest Commando you could buy.
A few performance figures from its era underscore
the last point dramatically. A stock Commando SS (a high-pipe version sold to
Americans looking for "street scrambler" machismo) consistently knocked off
12.6-second, 100-plus mph quarter-mile times in magazine tests of the day. And
when Tony Murphy took a '72 Production Racer to Willow Springs, former Norton
factory rep Brian Slark reports, he got the bike around in less than 1:40.
Considering that the lap record at the time the absolute lap record,
Slark further notes—was around 1:36, the motorcycle had to be taken very
seriously indeed as a racing machine.
In England, nobody had to be told. Built in
batches by Peter Inchley's famous "Long Shop" race department team (the name
comes from the long Nissen hut the shop called home, a building dating from the
time Thruxton Circuit was Thruxton Aerodrome, home to a B-17 bomber wing of the
Eighth Air Force), the Production
Racers were at first hard to come by. By late
1971, the Marketing Department at Norton had allocated enough to the race shop
to insure that any production-race grid in England would show at least a dozen
bikes and more often than not, that one of them would win the race. Some of this
was due to simple saturation—nobody else at the time built a race-ready
production racer for the class—but most of it was due to the quality of
Inchley's work.
To turn the street bike rolling-chassis that got
delivered from the Andover factory to the Long Shop into a Production Racer,
Inchley and development engineer factory racer Peter Williams had fine-tuned the
original Wally Wyatt project racer of 1969 considerably. Making use of the Long
Shop's proximity to the Thruxton circuit (as in: It's in the front yard, mate),
Williams and Inchley used run-it-and-see development as well as the tried and
true engine tweaks known to work on the old Atlas 750cc engine. The few bikes
that emerged from the Long Shop (estimates vary from less than 100 to less than
200 and documentation might as well be nonexistent) proved the worth of the
work, because in 1971, '72 and most of '73, they virtually owned their class in
England and Europe. Only the arrival of the Kawasaki Z-l and the curing of the
Honda CB750Kl's handling ills finally put them on their trailers.
Any corrections or more information on these motorcycles will be kindly appreciated.