Eric Offenstadt's Monocoque Triple
“THE SMALLER, LOWER 750 MONOCOQUE WEIGHED JUST 12KG. THE BIKE’S REDUCED BULK RESULTED IN A LOW 129KG DRY WEIGHT – 9KG LESS THAN THE FACTORY KAWASAKI H2R!”
Britain’s Peter Williams is rightly thought of as the paragon of such talented virtuosos, and by personally conceiving the John Player Norton Monocoque, which he then rode to victory in the 1973 Isle of Man TT, he’s made sure of his place in the record books for all time.
But there’s another much less well-known figure – at least outside his native France – who in this, his 80th birthday year, deserves comparable admiration – especially since he was racing his own self-conceived monocoque-framed bike to 500GP rostrums two years before the first Williams-designed Norton Monocoque ever turned a wheel. That man is Eric Offenstadt, universally known as Pépé, and he actually turned out to be even more multi-talented than Williams.
That’s because his admittedly less successful motorcycle race career than PJW’s bracketed a spell as a top level open-wheel F2/F3 car driver racing for such illustrious teams as Matra and Team Lotus, in which he defeated the likes of future world champions Jackie Stewart and Jim Clark, before returning to motorcycle racing to pick up where he’d left off eight years earlier.
His decision to return to two-wheeled competition came about thanks to a chance meeting with an old friend at the Stand 14 café in Paris, opposite the butcher’s shop run by Jean-Pierre Beltoise’s dad, which was where all Parisian two-wheeled road racers hung out.
During the eight years Eric was away racing cars, his chum Xavier Maugendre’s SIDEMM company, founded in 1968, had become highly successful French Kawasaki importers.
Committed to the cause of promoting Kawasaki through competition, in 1971 Maugendre would create the fabulous Coupe Kawasaki one-make race series, which bred a long list of future French stars like Patrick Pons, Christian Sarron, Marc Fontan etc.
But for 1970 he decided to take advantage of the arrival of the world’s first multi-cylinder two-stroke 500GP customer racer, the Kawasaki H1R triple, to form a two-bike race team with the support of the first outside sponsor
