DUMBO Jet
Of the many small-volume motorcycle manufacturers in two-wheeled history, Germany’s Friedel Münch was actually one of the most far-sighted. He foresaw the modern-day Superbike era in a dead-heat with Count Domenico Agusta by commencing production in 1966 of the world’s first four-cylinder performance streetbike to reach the marketplace, three years before the showroom debut of the Honda CB750. Except, the Count’s aesthetically challenged (I mean, a rectangular headlamp?) MV Agusta 600 Quattro was a practically apologetic example of multi-cylinder motorcycling, of which the 136 examples built had exactly half the capacity but somewhat more than half the weight of the aptly named Münch-4 1200TTS Mammut, as it was formally known before a German bicycle manufacturer who’d registered the name stepped in to prevent that.
Münch Motorcycles constructed 478 such bikes in various capacities up until 1980, before the actions of others brought Friedel’s firm to its knees. All of the machines found ready buyers – more than 150 of them in the USA alone, where they continued being called the Mammoth – through being surely bigger, certainly costlier and arguably more exclusive than any other catalogued road bike built anywhere else for some time. Big, loud and extremely Teutonic, they epitomised engineering excess on two wheels.
Friedel Münch was born in 1927 in a village 30km north of Frankfurt, in the Hesse region of Germany where he lived all his life. His father’s business repairing cars and motorcycles meant he grew up around bikes, and by the age of six he could already ride one. Friedel served as a Luftwaffe mechanic during WW2, and in the austere post-war years joined the family business to display a remarkable talent for improvisation and lateral thinking in keeping customers’ bikes running at a time when spare parts were in short supply. He began tuning Horex motorcycles for racing, at which he turned out to be a dab hand, winning several races on his home-brewed 500cc Münch Spezial until a serious accident at the Schottenring circuit in 1951 resulting in a damaged liver encouraged him to hang up his helmet and focus on the engineering. Such were his
