"The brand's famous slogan, 'Since 1901', is a testament to the replica's importance and rich heritage to Royal Enfield. The year 1901 also carries considerable weight in the motorcycle world as it makes Royal Enfield the oldest motorcycle manufacturer in production to this day."
Royal Enfield historian and a member of the global brand team, Gordon May hasn't found one, and he has been watching for one for 20 years.
There were no surviving design blueprints or technical drawings which gave any usable reference to how the motor-bicycle was constructed. All that remained were a few period photographs, some promotional advertisements and a couple of illustrated news articles from 1901 that gave some basic graphic clues and information as to how the motor-bicycle would have looked and might have functioned.
Gordon was making an on-line historical presentation for Royal Enfield employees about June, 2020, when he challenged the company to recreate the iconic missing motorcycle.
Five minutes after he ended the talk his phone rang. It was Simon Warburton, now chief program manager at Royal Enfield, in effect accepting the challenge.
Is the resulting Project Origin a precise replica? No. For one thing, it's metric, for the convenience of the engineers and their computers.
No comments:
Post a Comment