CACCIATORE ROSSO
Back in 2016, I’d finally got some miles on the Square Four which had been featured in RC the previous year. I’d learned a bit about Ariels, mostly through the splendid Ariel Owners’ MCC, which had started me thinking about buying a girder-forked single.
During idle moments, I’d look at the adverts. Snooping around the internet one day, I found a likely candidate advertised as a 1948 Red Hunter and located in Castiglion Fiorentino, a small town in Tuscany. It was a rather good price that I could afford and I started asking questions, starting with the history of this model…
Val Page’s Ariel single was already a well-developed design when the W/NG was laid out for the War Department. Elements of the engine could be traced to the famous Black Ariels of the late 1920s. The form of the crankcase, timing case, crankshaft and plunger oil pump was established by 1930 and formed the basis of the powerplant which went to war. The crankshaft sludge trap appeared in 1931 and stayed in the Ariel crankshaft until 1958.
The frame design, which had shown some
