DEVIL IN DISGUISE

While struggling to establish the fledgling bike business he’d founded in 1946, Joe Ehrlich developed a water-cooled EMC split-single 2-stroke GP racer. The bike used a ladepumpe supercharging piston in a design clearly based on the prewar DKW factory racer with which Germany’s Ewalde Kluge won the 1938 Isle of Man Lightweight TT — the first non-British bike/rider combo to do so.

Fitted in a twin-loop frame with a girder fork and plunger rear suspension, in the hands of all-rounder road racing and scrambles star Les Archer, the 250cc EMC won the prestigious Hutchinson 100 held at Britain’s first post-war National race meeting at Dunholme in 1947. Buoyed by that success, Ehrlich produced a 350cc version of the bike, now with Dowty telescopic forks but still a plunger rear end, which Don Crossley rode in the 1947 Manx GP. However, such was the supercharged engine’s prodigious thirst that it ran out of fuel on the Mountain on lap 3 en route to a planned single fuel stop for the six-lap race. Oops!

So for 1948 Ehrlich completely redesigned the motorcycle, with a much larger 5-gallon (22.5-liter) fuel tank atop a revised tubular steel duplex