When cops joined the rotary club

THE LETTER from Bill Munro in Octane 208 about Dennis Poore, CEO of Norton owner Manganese Bronze Holdings, demanding that a Norton Wankel engine be fitted in an MG Metro came as a complete surprise to me – as it would have done to John Favill, a senior designer with Norton-Villiers, who gave me a lot of information on the Wankel engine and much else.

I assume that the Norton Wankel motorbike engine in the MG Metro was a prototype water-cooled design, like the ones in the Norton-Villiers police bikes. As described in my book Motoring in the Last 100 Years, the Wolverhampton Way, this had its origins in a licence to produce the Wankel engine that was offered to BSA in 1972. In 1973 BSA was taken over by Norton-Villiers, and by 1979 a batch of 25 Wankel-powered Norton’bikes had been produced.

The Mk2 version, introduced in 1981, had an impressive spec: a 450lb kerbside weight, 80bhp, top speed of more than 130mph, plus the typical rotary