Coolest Sportbikes of the ’90s: Britten V1000

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This is Britten No. 5 (serial No. P002) on display at “The Art of the Motorcycle” at the Guggenheim in Las Vegas, in the early ’90s. (Blake Conner/)

You didn’t seriously think we were going to talk about the coolest sportbikes of the ‘90s and not talk about perhaps the single most amazing sportbike of all time, did you? That’s a strong statement, to be sure, but nothing before it and nothing since is as impressive as the bike that John Britten designed and built in his small New Zealand garage. I’ll stand by those words. The first-gen V1000, and later second-gen V1000/V1100 were rolling experiments on which Britten’s ideas, and practical solutions to problems are visible for all to see in the final form the bikes took. Other than a few parts that he sourced, such as brakes, pistons, transmission, and clutch, the rest he built from scratch in his workshop, with a small group of craftsmen. He was truly a once-in-a-generation type of guy.

In the June 1992 issue of <i>Cycle World</i>, Kevin Cameron penned this story on Britten’s effort at Daytona that year. (Cycle World Archives/)

Britten told Kevin Cameron in a June 1992 story in Cycle World that he likes to “work from first principles” rather than to develop the designs of others. This one statement explains so much about how the motorcycles he designed and built came to be. In total, 10 bikes were built, six prior to Britten’s death from cancer in 1995 and four posthumously, as he had promised to build that number at minimum.

So many of Britten’s decisions were based on finding solutions to the bike’s efficiency. First and foremost were the bike’s aerodynamics. The 60-degree V-twin engine was chosen because of its slim width, while so many of the associated components were designed or placed to accomplish those goals. Always further seeking solutions, once his first-generation bike was three years old, Britten started pursuing improvements.

Cameron picks it up here: “But where should his effort go? Into a new four-valve cylinder head? Or a five-valve? Or maybe he should develop a novel aerodynamic and cooling concept? Leading-link forks interested him; he felt none seen so far was much good, and he wanted to try ideas of his own. And Marvic magnesium wheels are expensive; perhaps he could save money and test some ideas by making his own wheels—in carbon fiber.

The Britten V1000 would still be considered a radical design today, it was earthshaking in 1992. (Cycle World Archives/)

“Any engineer would be proud to succeed in just one of those developments. Indeed, most of those concepts are clearly too much for entire factories, whose output of innovation is in detail improvement, not great leaps forward. John Britten decided to tackle them all: two new cylinder-head designs, fresh aerodynamics, the fork, and the wheels.”

Starting with the aerodynamics, he had figured out through testing on a 20-mile long, straight road that his fully faired bike was slower than the previous half-faired bike. Cameron continued: “Britten’s answer had two parts. One, by eliminating the wide lower fairing, he would reduce the area of the wake. Two, he would fill what wake there was with fast-moving air from two sources. The first source would be air passing between the rider’s calves and the narrow engine-gearbox unit; the second source would be radiator-exit air, delivered from a fully ducted cooling system.

“As a result of this approach, Britten’s new racebike is built like a torpedo atop a knife blade,” Cameron said. “The torpedo is the windscreen, and front fairing, the rider’s body behind it, and the tapering seat back behind that. Below is the blade, consisting of the front and rear tires, plus the narrow engine. Small ‘boot fairings’ provide coverage for the rider’s feet.”

The Britten graced the cover of <i>Cycle World</i> in June of 1992, and has to be one of the most memorable covers of all time. (Cycle World Archives/)

Placing the bike’s radiator underneath the seat helped reduce the bike’s frontal area as he didn’t want the drag. Air was ducted by a pair of slits in the front fairing to the radiator and then out into the low-pressure zone in the bike’s wake. Despite being fairly small, the radiator kept engine temps around 176 degrees.

Another area he was keen to explore were the cylinder heads. “A major source of impaired intake flow in cylinders heads is the masking of valves as a result of their closeness to the cylinder walls,” Cameron said. “Britten decided to scrap the idea of symmetry in favor of moving the intake valves closer to the roomy middle of the cylinder. This pushed the exhausts, and the spark plug with them, closer to the front wall. He chose a 99mm bore, partly because he could easily obtain a modern Omega three-ring piston of amazingly light weight in that size, designed originally for the Judd V-10 Formula One auto racing engine.”

In order to shorten development time and due to his limited resources, Britten built his own cylinder-head buck and experimented on the flow bench, building up the intake and then exhaust ports in clay and adjusting until he got what he wanted. Once satisfied he made castings, cleaned them up and, boom, he had 170 hp at 9,500 rpm on the dyno. Intake tracts on each cylinder were placed facing the inside of the Vee, so that they could easily be fed by the airbox and throttle bodies that were located there. Which meant that exhaust ports were facing forward on the front cylinder and rearward on the back. Since the primary exhaust tubes were tapered and needed to be of equal length, and there was no easy way to fabricate them, each exhaust system took around 60 hours to build. Hence their pile of spaghetti appearance.

It takes a special type of person to take on a project on the scale of the V1000. For it to actually outperform the competition on racetracks around the world is nothing short of astonishing. (Cycle World Archives/)

There were two engine variations to adhere to racing rules: 985cc with 99 x 64mm bore and stroke dimensions, and 1,108cc with 99 x 72mm measurements. It had double overhead cams that were belt driven, while the compression ratio was 11.3:1, valves were titanium, as were the connecting rods. Induction was from a pair of sequential injectors for each cylinder (at a time when only a few super-rare production bikes featured EFI, like the Honda NR750 and Yamaha GTS1000).

Another significant undertaking was the suspension, and in particular the girder fork, as Cameron explained: “Britten chose the basic girder concept used by Fior and Hossack because of the versatility of its geometry. A pair of leading links projects forward from the front of the bike at steering-head height, each with a ball joint at its forward end. Attached to the two ball joints is a girder, each of whose two legs clamps to an end of the front wheel’s 47mm tubular-aluminum axle. Steering control is through a scissors-link from the girder to a set of handlebars pivoted in the usual location. For Britten, the big question was, what geometry should he choose? Constant-wheelbase? Zero-dive? Anti-dive?

The Britten’s frameless chassis is still futuristic by today’s standards. The girder fork, carbon fiber swingarm, pushrod rear shock and its front placement, radical aerodynamics, and so on are to this day unlike anything else in existence on a single machine. (Cycle World Archives/)

In the end, he decided to “reject all of these—for social reasons,” Cameron added. “Riders are accustomed to the cues they get from conventional forks which, some of the braking force serves to compress the fork. Britten therefore made his girder fork initially pro-dive, just like a telescopic fork. In the last 1.6 inches of the total 4.7 inches of front-wheel travel, this changes to a somewhat anti-dive behavior.”

His first iteration of the carbon fiber fork failed on the bike’s maiden test at the Ruapuna racetrack, sending test rider Chris Haldane to the ground with a broken collarbone; this was just eight weeks before they intended to race at Daytona. His redesign was carried onto all the remaining bikes and never failed again. The carbon fiber swingarm was so ahead of its time that only in recent years have MotoGP teams started to adopt them.

Like the bodywork, fork, and swingarm, which he crafted by building up a skeleton of aluminum welding wire held together with hot glue to create the shape, then covering it in foam to create the molds, he used the same method to make his own carbon fiber wheels. Once he had created his prototype wheel, he took it and a production magnesium racing wheel to a testing center, where it was tested for deflection and strength. His first batch only had 60 percent of the deflection of the production wheel and passed the destruction tests with flying colors. He was then satisfied enough to make up five fronts and rears each.

It’s all about the details. There are literally so many amazing details to the V1000 that you could stand and stare all day. (First Last Name/)

Success can be measured in many ways, and for sure, the Brittens had achieved amazing acclaim simply by their existence. He had literally conceived and built things that no one had seen before. Think about just a few of the radical features, like the fact that the bike didn’t have a conventional frame, the radical girder front end, the carbon fiber wheels and bodywork, the rear shock that was located in front of the engine and actuated by an under-engine pushrod, the underseat radiator, an engine that he cast and then baked in his wife Kirsteen’s pottery kiln then quenched with swimming pool water in a bucket, and most obvious was his attention to aerodynamics like no one had seen before. This list could go on and on. But remember this was also the early ‘90s. It was radical. And it worked, quite well.

The racer who will always be remembered for the Britten’s racing successes is New Zealander Andrew Stroud. Not only did Stroud win a lot of races on the V1000, he competed in 41 WSBK, 20 500 Grand Prix, and eight Suzuka 8 Hours races, among others. (Cycle World Archives/)

If you’re going to build a racebike, nothing earns you kudos like on-track results. From the very beginning, the Britten was intended purely as a racebike, with very little interest paid to anything else (he had scrapped the idea of supplying Bimota with engines). With only a handful of bikes ever being built, it was the rarest of birds, but the bike achieved amazing results in the classes it was eligible in. At the time, most of the international classes it was allowed into were for twin-powered machines, like AHRMA Battle of the Twins, AMA SuperTwins, the British European American Racing and Supporters (BEARS) World Championship which Britten helped create, Pro Twins, the New Zealand National Superbike series, and at the Isle of Man TT’s Formula One and Senior TT races.

Right out of the gate, the bike raised some serious eyebrows. At Daytona in 1992 in the AMA SuperTwins race—after the crew stayed up all night repairing a cracked cylinder, caused by leaking coolant—fellow New Zealander Andrew Strowd quickly moved from 12th to battling Ducati-mounted Canadian Pascal Picotte on the factory Fast by Ferracci Ducati for the lead, only to have an incorrectly installed battery die with the finish in sight. But despite the disappointment, David had given Goliath a serious run. During the race Stroud was pulling up alongside Picotte on the rear wheel and clearly had the faster bike. Stroud told Cycle News’ Henny Ray Abrams after the race: “A few times down the straight I was only three-quarters throttle. John’s pretty clever. Most of the things he does work.”

The March 22, 1995, issue of <i>Cycle News</i> documented Andrew Stroud’s win in the BEARS event, which he followed up with a second place in the AHRMA Battle of the Twins race, with <i>CW</i> contributor Nick Ienatsch hot on his heels in third. (Cycle News Archives/)

But from that point forward, with constant tinkering and development, the bike started winning races. After Stroud took a second-place finish at Laguna Seca in the AMA SuperTwins race a few months later (albeit 16 seconds arrears of Picotte), it went on to win a trio of races that year in BEARS and Battle of the Twins competition. The following year the bikes basically cleaned up in the NZ Grand Prix series and took first and second in the New Zealand National Superbike Championship the following year.

Britten’s first stab at the Isle of Man TT was in 1993 where Shaun Harris rode the Cardinal Britten in the Senior TT. After electrical issues in qualifying, Harris started way back in the field, and ultimately had an oil-filter failure end his race, but he did record the fastest top speed of the race at 164 mph. For the next attempt, the following year, Britten put together a star-studded lineup that included Nick Jefferies, and Mark Farmer on Roberto Crepaldi’s customer Britten. But the attempt ended in tragedy when Farmer was killed in practice at the ultra-quick Black Dub section.

With only 10 Brittens in existence, this pair includes the first customer bike (bike four) No. P001 that was originally purchased by Italian businessman Roberto Crepaldi.

However there were successes in 1994 with more wins and a bunch of land-speed records. But in ‘95, the year John Britten succumbed to cancer, the bike had arguably its most dominating season. Winning the European Pro Twins race at Assen, then Stroud and teammate Stephen Briggs dominated the BEARS World Championship, finishing one, two in the series and winning all but one race. You can watch the Brands Hatch round here. Stroud won the AHRMA Battle of the Twins at Daytona in 1994 (also recording the fastest-ever top speed by a motorcycle at the speedway at 189 mph), and then again 1995, 1996, and 1997. After John’s death, the bikes continued to rack up wins. Eight more wins both in ‘96 and ‘97, and then a couple more to close out the millennium.

If there is one term to describe John Britten and his motorcycles, it has to be world beaters. The amount of success that was achieved is truly amazing, especially when you consider all of the innovation that was on display, and the fact that those innovations weren’t just novel ideas but actually performed at the highest level possible where the bike competed. His free-thinking creativity will forever live on in the machines that bear his name.

If you’ve never seen a Britten in person, visit the Barber Vintage Motorsport Museum in Birmingham, Alabama, where Britten No. 7 (serial No. P004) resides. Or you can also visit the Solvang Motorcycle Museum in Solvang, California, where the final and 10th Britten (serial No. P008) is on display.

1992–1995 Britten V1000/1100 Specs

MSRP:	$100,000 (1992 Price for Customer Bikes)
Engine:	DOHC, liquid-cooled, 60-degree V-twin; 4 valves/cyl.
Displacement:	998cc / 1,108cc
Bore x Stroke:	99.0 x 64.0mm / 99.0 x 72.0mm
Compression Ratio:	11.3:1
Transmission/Final Drive:	5-speed/chain
Claimed Horsepower:	170.0 hp @ 9,500 rpm
Claimed Torque:	N/A
Fuel System:	Sequential fuel injection, 2 injectors/cyl.
Clutch:	Dry clutch
Engine Management/Ignition:	Programmable engine management
Frame:	Full stressed engine/frameless
Front Suspension:	Double wishbone w/ girder w/ Öhlins shock
Rear Suspension:	Carbon fiber swingarm w/ front-mounted, pushrod-actuated Öhlins shock
Front Brake:	4-piston Brembo calipers, twin 320mm cast-iron discs
Rear Brake:	Brembo caliper, 220mm disc
Wheels, Front/Rear:	carbon fiber; 17 x 3.5 in. / 17 x 6.0 in.
Rake/Trail:	Adjustable/adjustable
Wheelbase:	55.9 in.
Ground Clearance:	N/A
Seat Height:	N/A
Fuel Capacity:	6.3 gal.
Claimed Dry Weight:	304 lb.

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