Café Grande

CAFÉ GRANDE

113 inches of American iron meets king-size

Confused? The cross-cultural café-racer/biker-bar vibe will do that to you.

This is the Supermanx, and it forces you to ask some strange questions. Like, does it matter that the fuel tank, oil tank and tailsection are hand-hammered aluminum in the finest English tradition? Is it wrong to paint such bodywork satin biack like a Fifties American street-rod? Should a Featherbed frame, even an oversized “replica” such as you see here, be painted in a heavy metalflake gold?

Mike Cook, British expat residing in the States for 20 years, can’t help himself.

“I’ve lived here so long, the American hot-rod stuff has just rubbed off on me,” he says with a shrug and a smile.

Cook is a lifelong biker who’s done work for Cosworth (Chevy IRL engines), traveled with the CART circus as a team crew member, and did several years at West Coast Choppers building bikes with Jesse James. His most notable work was on Jesse’s “Killer Café” Honda VTX (Cycle World coverbike, February,

2004), on which Cook says he spent plenty of time.

After a couple of years pounding out his personal café project and finally finishing it up in the form you see here, Cook thought it was time to bust out his own shingle and start a motorcycle company, American Café Racers (www.americancaferacers.com).

Fresh off its build when we got our hands on it, the Supermanx was yet to be street-licensed, so we got only a brief spin through the vast expanses of the empty parking lot at California Speedway. It’s got the expected big-inch lunge you’d associate with the Ultima-built mill-not to mention a huge sound blasting out of those vaguely Vincent headers and size-12 Dunstall Decibel replica pipes. If there are any complaints, the heavy-duty vibe action coming through pretty much every bodily interface was a bit much.

“Yeah, we know it vibrates a lot,” Cook says. ‘That’s why for our production version we’ll be using the counterbalanced 103-cubic inch Twin Cam Beta motor. We’ll have bigger ones optional, too.”

Sounds perfect. Killing the shakes will make this $39,900 piece a sweet ride indeed. The rest of the package-within the limited confines of our parking lot spin-is fun to squirt around on, the chassis with its tidily braced swingarm, inverted WP fork and triple Brembo disc brakes working pretty well. Most things will remain the same for production, although the bodywork is likely to be roto-molded plastic to help keep cost down, and the frame will change to accept the Twin Cam engine and transmission.

Anybody up for some fish and chips on Main Street at Daytona? -Mark Hoyer