EVO
Beefed-up Eighties AMA Superbike replicas will never go out of style. But this is no replica. It’s got a one-off aluminum chassis, and Soichiro wouldn’t pee on that engine, even if it were on fire...
GARY INMAN
THERE IS A SMALL CULT OF BIKE builders in Europe obsessed with creating brutal road bikes inspired by early-Eighties AMA Superbikes. Some are straight replicas, others have modern twists. This bike was never going to be an exact replica. Englishman Steve Elliott had already come close to building one of those with his Moriwaki Z1000—an homage to the bike Australian Wayne Gardner first rode when he went to Europe. But even that bike was updated, not a slavish repetition.
This project was different. Elliott says a recurring daydream was the inspiration for the bike: “I imagined if RSC [Race Service Center, Honda's forerunner of HRC] was to build a bike for Freddie Spencer now, how would it look?”
This is his answer, and there are few specials in the world that have been subjected to more pondering than Elliott’s Freddie Spencer EVO. No corners were cut. Not a single one. 1 first saw the bike four years ago. It had already been in development for two years and looked a bit like this. It had a one-off frame, but not this one. Elliott was so pedantic about every detail, so sure he needed the best of the best, I wasn’t convinced it would ever be finished. I underestimated him. I won’t do that again.
It says Honda on the fuel tank, and it isn’t lying. It is a Honda CB900F tank.
The seat is Honda, too, but that’s about it as far as anything to do with Soichiro’s company. Suzuki engine? We’ll get to that. Elliott says he wanted the bike to be fully custom, and it pretty much is. Very little is off-the-shelf, and what has been bought is top-quality and limited-edition.
First, a one-off Reynolds chrome-moly frame was made by a classic-bike frame builder in England who creates chassis for MV Agusta racers, but Elliott was never happy with it. “This project had to be perfect, and that frame wasn’t,” he says.
So, when Gavin Goddard left Spondon Engineering to set up his own engineering firm, GIA, Elliott commissioned a big-tube, 7020-alloy, duplex, twin-shock chassis. Elliott requested bracing where both he and Goddard knew none was required, just to recreate the look of an ’81-era AMA racer. You could run a Sherman tank over this frame and it wouldn’t buckle.
Then Elliott turned his attention to the top shock mounts. They’re compact morsels of fabricated delight, thought out and planned over weeks and a hundred cups of tea. The top mounts contain transition-fit spacers that are a story in themselves. One evening, Elliott froze the aluminum spacers to fit into the frame, knocked them into place, then went to bed. But something nagged him. The fit was so tight, was there a chance, as they expanded, that they could crack the frame? At 2 a.m., he got back out of bed, went down to the garage, knocked the spacers out and spent two hours rubbing them with emery cloth until the fit was acceptable. “I must’ve been crazy,” says Elliott. No one is arguing.
Finally, the whole chassis was anodized black. “I didn’t want anything shiny,” Elliott explains. “I wanted it all to be flat, like a racebike. I wanted a military feel.”
Elliott adds that the whole bike is designed around the gargantuan rear wheel and that the swingarm is made to hug as tightly as possible to the 200-section rear tire. The rim is a classic H-section 17 x 6.75-inch Dymag. It’s a wheel Dymag had lying around from an order placed by the Roberts/Rainey Yamaha team back in ’88. The front is a 16-in. Dymag from an RG500 racer.
An NOS Honda CB1000 Big One fork was chosen because it’s conventional, fairly modern and has endurance-style dropouts. The shocks are one-offs by Works Performance with the right period looks. So do the brakes. Recognize them? Didn’t think so. They’re one-piece Spondon calipers, monoblocs developed 17 years before Yamaha trumpeted the development on itsYZF-Rl. Discs are Spondon, too.
The only part of the jigsaw that Freddie’s crew would recognize? Elliott experimented with other logos on the tank, but nothing worked, so Honda it is. Elliott points out that the metalflake Bel-Ray logos are hand-painted.
“The tank has been modified to take twin Newton quick-fillers that give that Ontario 6-hour race look,” says Elliott, dropping an arcane reference into the conversation. When it comes to this era of racebike, he is a professor.
Using a Suzuki motor is the twist in the bike’s tail. And because it’s such a classic design, the air/oil-cooled Suzuki Four doesn’t look out of place in a Freddie Spencer EVO. “The CB motor was fragile in 1979. The factory struggled to keep them going, so what chance would I have?” wondered Elliott. “So, what to use? It had to be air-cooled, strong, tunable.”
A used 1157 XR, as Elliott refers to it (Bandit motor to you and me), was sourced. Reason for the choice, says Elliott: “They’re powerful, simple to work on and plentiful.” Internally, it’s standard. It has a Dyna ignition and Yoshimura engine covers. But Elliott still found the scope to express himself. UK pipe specialists Racefit created the titanium exhaust. “We designed the pipe to mimic the Siamese pipes Mike Velasco built for Honda RSC in the ’80s, but more extreme in every way,” Elliott explains. Even the baffle tube is titanium.
Not to be outdone, the carbs are personally imported Mikuni/Yoshimura dualstack 40mm TMR MJNs. They are works of fuel-atomizing art with dual stacks (two bellmouths per carb) and Multi-Jet Needles—tiny holes in each needle that, Yoshimura says, improves response. Like all flatslides, they’re not made for aroundtown riding. A quick spin shows that this bike works, though. It starts and stops. It barks at the moon and snarls at the sun. It looks great and feels good. It’s pure inspiration. The crème de la crème.
As far as this style of bike goes, there is a lot of scope to be inspired by, to copy and mutate, but it’s hard to imagine how it could be bettered. Yes, you could throw more shiny parts at it, but that’d be wrong. You could tune the motor and make it unusable. Where would that get you?
I’m not sure Elliott will ever build another EVO. So, who else can better it? The gauntlet’s been thrown down.
