RIDEFAST DECEMBER 2021

The
Britten
V1000
Ahead of its time…
Never heard of it? Well we have
– and we even tried to see the
bike at its home in the Auckland
Museum of natural history. Sadly,
when we were there, the museum
decided to swap the Britten
display for a flippen Aeroplane…
Silly people! This bike is the stuff
that legends are made of.
Read on…
HISTORIC BIKES
handles because he couldn’t find exactly
what he wanted. It was almost inevitable
that he would build his own bike, the
Britten V1000.
Usually when someone decides to
build their own machine, they tend to
build parts like the chassis and the
bodywork themselves, and pinch the big
components like the engine, suspension
and wheels from mainline manufacturers.
Not John Britten.
He fabricated almost every component
from scratch. Then, it was hand built by
a group of friends in a shed, thousands
of kilometres away from any racetrack,
and went on to beat the major motorcycle
manufacturers.
Innovative design.
The liquid-cooled, 1000cc, V-Twin engine
was developed in-house. He heat treated
the engine by placing it in his wife’s
pottery oven and cooled it with water
from his swimming pool. The home-built
160bhp motor was far more advanced
than the rest of the competition and even
featured a fully programmable ECU…
This was 1991. If our memory serves
correctly, Ducati were the only mainline
brand with programmable ECU’s.
But the engine was just the start of this
machines innovation. Unconvinced with
conventional front fork design, Britten
decided that it could be done better.
New Zealander John Britten was a
mechanical engineer, motorcycle nut
and amateur racer. He didn’t see himself
as anything special. This was probably
down to the fact that he lived on an
isolated Island, so if he needed a part,
he built it himself. He built his own
house from recycled materials,
casting things like door