THE BRITTEN: Two-Wheeled Inspiration

Many have worked night and day to embody an innovation or two in a motor­cycle, but the late John Britten tackled the entire vehicle-designing by building his own big V-twin engine from scratch, fabricating carbon-fiber chassis and wheels in new ways, developing a novel front suspension, creating a ducted under-seat cooling system, and taking on a fresh approach to aerodynamics.

What struck me about John when I first met him at Daytona in 1991 was his boyish enthusiasm. He wanted to make useful things and was enjoying every minute. Effort was clearly involved, but it all came so easily that, for him, this was play. Somehow he and a group of enthusiasts had designed and built a complete original motorcycle and had brought it 8,000 miles from New Zealand to race at Daytona.

“I like to work from first principles,” he said.

That means thinking about the problem itself rather than letting the solutions of others block his imagination. First principles.

In addition to having a deep well of workable ideas, he inspired others and created a team that got big jobs done very quickly. His method of rapidly developing 3-D shapes, such as fairing pieces or ducts, was to begin with easily-bent aluminum welding wire, fastened by a hot-melt glue gun, then sheeted-over with urethane to become the basis of a mold.

“I changed it a heap of times,” he said.

After testing at sustained high speed on a 20-mile stretch of straight road in New Zealand, he rejected conventional fairings entirely. The first clue was that his very narrow bike was faster with no lower fairing at all. He therefore concentrated on minimizing frontal area. He applied streamlining only in specific areas.

His ability to conceive new methods of fabrication seemed boundless. The second year, he had worked up an incremental method of developing engine ports.

“Usually people start with what’s there and try to improve it. But how do you design a port from scratch?” he proposed, rhetorically.

He machined combustion chamber and valve seats into a thick Plexiglas plate then marked necessary stud locations and oilways with aluminum tubes. Starting at the valve seats, he built up the ports little by little, optimizing them on a flow bench at each step. From this buck he then made casting patterns.

“I’m really rather chuffed about it,” he said. He reckoned it had netted a 24-percent flow increase over his previous design. “Once I’ve done something one way, I don’t really like to use that method again.”

Despite such confidence in his own ideas, when standing with his bike and crew in the Daytona tech line for the first time, he said, “I’ve never been so nervous in me life!”

His “skin and bones” chassis fabrication was like nothing else seen previously. Placing aluminum spools at two wide lugs on each of the engine’s cylinder heads and around the steering head, he then wound carbon-fiber roving from spool to spool to produce the triangulated “bones.” Then he sheeted-in the spaces between the bones with carbon fabric. Wetted-out and cured, this made a compact and rigid whole. He credited the similar (steel) chassis of the Vincent Series-B as inspiration.

“I find that working with direc­tional materials has given me a real distrust of metal. Metals don’t seem solid to me anymore. I think of them as like very tightly packed sand.”

Wanting to avoid the frictional lock-up of telescopic forks during braking, he fabricated a carbon girder fork, which riders could easily accept because in its initial travel it felt just like teles (he knew a failing of many alternative bikes was that they spooked their riders by behaving oddly).

He and his group poured and machined their own engine castings, which are very smooth and of graceful organic shape, like tree trunks. He said nature had been an endless source of ideas.

“I like to work in periods of five weeks, sleeping four to five hours a night. I find I can concentrate better when I’m tired. I don’t jump from one project to another.”

I said to him, “Every field of endeavor has its own aes­thetic—motorcycles, circuit-board design, mathematics. How can we make sense of this?”

John replied, “I’m sure that if we could know enough, we’d find that there’s one underlying aesthetic that connects them all.”

Although he had a university degree in mechanical engineering, John would sometimes say his field was decorative glassware. He had also completed several architectural projects, some of them quite large.

In his Daytona garage, John stood talking with specialist machinist Homer Knapp. Each man began producing objects out of his pockets to illustrate points under discussion. John pulled out a Cosworth DFX titanium rod, like those in his engine, as Knapp handed over his own rod design for the VFR Honda. They discussed wristpin oiling. This is new ideas popping into being—sparks given off from conversation between people who build things.

The last time I spoke with John was over a Daytona lunch. At the end, he said, “When this motorcycle thing is over, I want to build a man-powered airplane. I think the people who are trying to do it now are missing an important point.”

The rest of John’s work will never be seen, as he died of cancer in 1995 at the age of 45.