Landspeeder
LANDSPEEDER
REVIVAL CYCLES’ INSPIRED BUILD AROUND A VINTAGE BMW
PAUL D’ORLÉANS
ONE BENEFIT OF TROLLING EUROPEAN BIKE SHOWS IS BUMPING INTO EX-FACTORY RACEBIKES HAULED FROM THE VAULTS.
Munich’s BMW Museum was in a generous mood in 2013 and toured a pair of its crown jewels—Ernst Henne’s 1932 and 1937 land speed record racers—to both the Concorso di Villa d’Este and its opposite, the Wheels & Waves festival in southern France. I’m a moto-judge at the Concorso and crawled around that supercharged ’32 75OCC LSR machine like a horny snail. In as-raced condition, it’s among the most beautiful wheeled vehicles ever built, with elegant shapes cladding brass-balls technical savvy. In Biarritz, it sat defiantly amidst a sea of Alt.Customs, which paled beside it. It was clear others saw the same glory: The next year, Japan’s Cherry’s Company displayed a BMW R nineT-based homage to Henne’s bike in that very hall, with gorgeously updated sheet metal and pinstriping. It was a work of inspired genius.
THE HANDBUILT MOTORCYCLE SHOW
Austin has two excellent excuses to visit April 8-10: MotoCP and Revival’s Handbuilt Show. The Handbuilt might just be the best Alt.Custom gathering in the US, with terrific organization, 100 exciting builders of the highest caliber, and a Wall of Death out back. Bikes inside include the best mix of vintage, highperformance customs, ’60s-style choppers, BikeEXIF stars, and art bikes. Add some truly great art on the venue walls, Austin’s famous food trucks, space enough between bikes for a full knee-down study, and (this year) a full block of street closure, and you’ve gota show not to be missed.
Alan Stulberg of Austin’s Revival Cycles also heard the siren call of that ’32 BMW at Wheels & Waves. The LSR bike paced in his imagination, and he grew obsessed. “Seeing that Henne bike was the seed, and I came home racking my brain—how could our team at Revival build something like this?” Stulberg said. “But money is tight; we can’t afford to do it for ourselves.
Then I was introduced to a Dallas collector who’s opening a gallery of motorcycles who said, ‘Let’s build what you want. Here’s my budget. What can you build for this?”’ Such carte blanche saw Stulberg waffling between dreams: a Vincent custom or Henne throwback? He ultimately tilted toward BMW for entirely practical reasons: “Our money’s better spent on labor than the starting material, and old BMWs are cheap.”
An internal issue nearly scuppered the plan, as Revival’s technical core—Stefan Hertel and Andy James, who’d nail down the technics and fabricate the thing—were opposed to building a bike for display only. Stulberg explains: “Our core ethic is functionality. That this bike wasn’t going to be ridden was a huge issue. I saw it as an opportunity for creative design, without the shackles of the street; not worrying legality meant we could spend more time on aesthetics. We argued about it for hours, but Stefan and Andy finally acquiesced.. .only because we decided to build two! One for racing and one for display. When we cut the sheet steel for the frame, we duplicated it for a second chassis.”
Revival’s flat steel chassis, while familiar to fans of pre-war BMWs, is a departure from the Henne bike, which actually uses a tube frame from a late ’20s R63 under aerodynamic aluminum panels. The new bike is scaled up slightly, with the wheelbase a few inches longer, the frame a little taller, and while Henne’s forks were trailing links with leaf springing and a small friction damper, Hertel’s tech bent meant a modern upgrade for the front end. The original fork was stable enough for a 159.1-mph record on the Frankfurt-Munich autobahn in 1936, but the “non-display” Revival Landspeeder will handily top that (more later). Hertel designed a trailing-link fork with a longer pivot arm (and elegant “speed holes”), using a modern shock with a kinematic adjustable preload, plus a very steep fork angle combined with 6 inches of trail, as he feels steeper head angles handle better even at speed.
Building that fork with contemporary performance expectations caused plenty of grief. “Stefan spent nearly six weeks designing that front end; I walked in at 10 p.m. one night and he was almost in tears. He was looking at the fork on a Max Hazan bike on his computer and knew they couldn’t work at speed but still said, ‘Look how elegant this thing is! But I have to make mine function at 150 mph and last 50 years.’ I said it doesn’t have to be so elegant, but it does have to work. An hour later he was done. He was emotionally spent solving the technical problems, but he gets credit for how beautiful the bike turned out.”
The Landspeeder is indeed beautiful, and dramatic, and while conjuring the spirit of Henne’s racer, in construction it’s a completely different animal. The use of an inexpensive ’70s-era BMW R100/7 powerplant left plenty of space for Revival’s stamp, seen from the streamlined valve covers inward. The Landspeeder features “all black everything” as the team omitted the distinctive pinstriping of the original; Henne’s body panels are hand-hammered and lumpy as a bag of lemons, but Andy James had the luxury of time for a perfect fit and finish, and those purposeful, decostreamline shapes need no accent.
In a few short years, Revival Cycles has moved smack into the middle of the moto-culture Renaissance. They build innovative Alt.Customs, travel the globe to ride their machines and support events, and host the increasingly important Handbuilt Show, running this April 8-10 in Austin, Texas, alongside MotoGP and MotoAmerica racing. Much-shared photos of the Revival team wheelying their customs at drags and ice races tells the tale: Their stuff works.
And it had better. That second iteration of the Landspeeder will house a supercharged BMW HP2 motor, with nearly 200 hp on tap, and should handily exceed Henne’s record on its Bonneville debut.
Given Revival’s knack for gorgeous functionality, there’s little doubt we’ll be ogling a very fast black projectile in the near future, made even more appealing with a coat of high-speed salt spray.
