ROTORS RETURN?

Around a quarter of a century ago rotary-engined motorcycles seemed set to be the next big thing. It certainly felt like it, after the Norton RC588 scored a Wankel-engined bike’s greatest victory by winning the 1992 Senior TT in the Isle of Man in the hands of the late Steve Hislop at a then record speed of 121.38mph, after a thrilling battle with future four-time World Superbike champion Carl Fogarty’s Yamaha. Coupled with the Duckhams Norton team’s domination of the 1994 British Superbike championship, with riders Ian Simpson and Phil Borley finishing 1-2 in the points table, Norton might have expected to benefit from this win with a spike in demand for its F1 Sport race replica streetbike. But the indebted British company was sliding towards insolvency, and production was soon to shut down of the last Wankel-engined motorcycle money could buy. Until now.

In 2019 it’s again possible to purchase a street-legal motorcycle powered by an engine of the kind invented by German engineer Felix Wankel, whose prototype design, featuring an eccentric rotor turning within a trochoidal chamber containing peripheral intake and exhaust ports, first saw the light of day in 1957, powering an NSU car. But not from today’s Norton, even though current owner Stuart Garner actually developed a prototype 700cc twin-rotor road racing engine ten years ago on taking the company over, before dropping it in favour of trying to meet demand for the air-cooled Commando 961 retro-twin that’s underpinned the company’s growth since then.

Instead, the rotary-engined motorcycle you can buy right now is built in the Netherlands by OCR Motors, whose owner Andries Wielinga is in doing so making the past live again. In the 1970s, Dutch two-wheeled tycoon Hendrik ‘Henk’Van Veen produced what was then by far the most high-performance as well as the most