French Boxer
Marcel worked as a delivery rider in Paris for the French sports daily L’Equipe, starting at 4.30am each morning as the first edition rolled off the presses in that pre-internet era. “It may resemble a BMW, but it was created with French style, and Gallic passion. Anyway, Monsieur le Président [de Gaulle, back then] personally chose the Ratier for his Garde Républicaine to escort him with. Vive la France!”
It was an improbable legacy of WW2 that the rugged 746cc boxer-engined sidevalve BMW R12 introduced in 1935, of which 36,000 examples were built by 1942 to equip the Wehrmacht [German army], and its later R71 sidevalve and R75 ohv derivatives, should spawn such copious descendants around the globe – including the French Ratier. This evolved from the 1940-44 German occupation of Paris, when the Wehrmacht established a massive stock of spare parts there to keep its numerous BMW motorcycles and sidecars running. Known simply as HPK 503, this warehouse was located in an old bus garage on the Avenue Mozart near the Bois de Boulogne, the park in which they later staged road races postwar. After the city was retaken by the Allies in August 1944, a factory was established nearby at Neuilly-sur-Seine under the CMR/Centre de Montage et Réparation label. Operated by the former HPK 503 workers, this was tasked by General de Gaulle’s new government of liberation to assemble complete motorcycles from the huge BMW spares stock, with Jacques Dormoy appointed Directeur Technique on January 1st 1945, to oversee this.
Under his aegis CMR built around 300 examples
