Letter From Europ

LETTER FROM Europ

The weird and wonderful Denco-Britten 1000

Many people fantasize about building their ideal motorcycle, but engineer and racer John Britten of Christchurch, New Zealand, is a man in a million: He actually turned his dreams into reality.

The result is certainly one of the strangest-looking motorcycles the world has ever seen: the Denco-Britten 1000.

Britten worked alongside a local manufacturer of 500cc speedway engines, Denco Engineering, to produce a lOOOcc VTwin power unit essentially comprising two 500cc Singles mounted on a common crankcase. But having been developed for dirt-track use. the long-stroke engine proved unsuitable for roadracing, in which Britten planned to develop the machine before a possible attempt at a road version.

Accordingly, the Denco engine was completely redesigned last year with the help of some useful advice from Californiabased tuner Jerry Branch, who was responsible for the design of the fourvalve cylinder heads. Now revamped to 94 x 72mm, the 999cc, 50-degree VTwin has an output of 105 bhp at 9000 rpm.

Each pair of camshafts on the eight-valve power unit is driven off the crank by a toothed belt. The engine runs a very high, 14.5:1 compression ratio, thanks to the locally permitted use of methanol in roadraces, and is fed by two 40mm Amal smoothbore carbs.

Britten has concentrated so far on getting the engine performance right, ignoring the question of sorting the chassis while he does so. The result is one of the most evil-handling bikes imaginable. The strange thing is that the bike’s specification looks great on paper, and is certainly highly innovative. Designed on a modular basis, the Kevlar and carbon-fiber monocoque can be unbolted from the dry-sump engine in a matter of moments, allowing the chassis and front wheel to be lifted off the engine for ease of access.

Britten is certainly on the right track, but all he needs now for the bike to be a winner, now that the engine is proven, is to sort out the chassis’ vices.

Then the Denco may end up challenging the eightvalve Ducatis for the title of the fastest Twin in the world—and 100 percent New Zealand built, at that. Alan Catheart, from Christchurch, New Zealand