A waiting game

A new Brooklands motorcycle? It is an interesting project that has kept the energetic Bob Chapman busy for a few months, a resurrection of a design that, at one time, had shown so much promise. But what is a Brooklands?

When The Classic MotorCycle featured the Brooklands Motorcycle Company in 2008, it was already from a historical viewpoint. The company had produced neither bikes nor bits for some time. To recap on the original article, a long held enthusiasm for Norton singles was the catalyst that established the business.

Single-cylinder bikes had been Norton’s mainstay for many years. There were plenty of prewar survivors and the legendary International continued well into the 1950s. All remained eminently suitable for riding, but regular use of bikes of that age inevitably led to wear and tear and the need for replacement parts. By then, what remained of the official Norton business was focused elsewhere.

And these were the pre-internet days, when sourcing obsolete motorcycle parts could be a long, frequently frustrating procedure and determination was needed to track down diminishing quantities of new-old stock. Seeing the sale of remanufactured parts as a possible way of keeping their own bikes running, Ian Thompson and Malcolm Nash started producing spares to the original Bracebridge Street specification. The Brooklands Motorcycles business soon grew, the range expanded and customers kept suggesting that there might even be a market for complete bikes. A small batch of components was not too difficult to organise, but the huge investment to