ONE YEAR WONDER
It’s a cliché to say that there’s nothing new under the sun, but so often in motorcycle development terms that’s all too true. Consider the single-sided swinging arm on the 1950 Moto Guzzi Galletto, conceived 30 years before ELF patented such a feature – and sold it to Honda. Or the upside-down Dowty fork on the 1948 EMC road racer – developed 35 years before Brad Lackey won the 1982 500cc MX World title using a Simons USD fork that was swiftly adopted globally thereafter. Or the 50-degree transverse V-twin engine layout of the 1931 AJS Model S3, conceived 35 years before the Moto Guzzi V7 launched in 1967, which established such to be the Italian marque’s trademark engine format, that it’s persisted with right up to today. OK, the 1000 examples of the Indian 841 built in 1941 to fulfil a US Army contract were possibly the Guzzi’s true progenitors, complete with the same 90-degree cylinder angle, let alone the mid-50s Marusho Lilac in Japan and Germany’s Victoria Bergmeister, both with a comparable engine layout. But still – you get the drift…
Except that even the so-called AJS Transverse Twin wasn’t truly the first such device to reach production, for five years earlier at London’s 1926 Olympia Show, the much smaller Yorkshire-based P&M firm – maker of Panther motorcycles from 1924 to 1967 – had unveiled its 246cc Panthette. This was a truly innovative if evidently underdeveloped transverse V-twin design by the iconoclastic Granville Bradshaw, with its 60-degree cylinder angle, horizontally-split crankcase, leaf-spring valve operation, enclosed rocker boxes and unit construction car-type 4-speed hand-change transmission. But despite the acclaim it received on its debut, the Panthette proved a flop in the showrooms, and the unreliability experienced by owners of the few bikes sold swiftly made the model a one-year wonder, which was replaced by a less costly, much simpler range
