EGLI ENFIELD 624 CAFÉ RACER From India via Switzerland
ARGUABLY, SWISS PERFORMANCE GURU FRITZ Egli, today 84, invented the V twin Café Racer more than 50 years ago. He ran the gamut of two-wheeled excess, with a series of bikes he and his team constructed to the highest engineering standards in the converted hilltop lumber store south of Zurich, which comprises the Egli factory, powered by a variety of engines ranging in complexity from one to six cylinders. The 3000 or so hand-built motorcycles Egli created from 1968 up until his 2012 retirement, when he handed his business over to the Frei family who run it today, have included esoteric two-wheelers of every extreme. These range from the Vincent twins and singles that kicked off the café racer cult back in the 1960s through the dozen or so TZ750 Yamahas Fritz built for F750 racing in the mid-1970s. Also his Honda-engined racer, on which Messieurs Godier and Genoud won the 1972 FIM Endurance Championship before going on to emulate Egli’s design excellence under their own names, to a range of four-cylinder hyperbikes powered by hotrod Japanese engines inflated way beyond their original capacity, and producing power considerably in excess of stock. And now, we’re looking at yet more of Fritz’s handmade hardware – the Egli Enfield Café Racer.
The modern-day relic of Britain’s pushrod power, a living, breathing two-wheeled time warp delivered from Redditch to Switzerland via India, combines economical transportation for the subcontinent’s home market with retro chic to fuel the nostalgia boom abroad. Because in between his core business of supercharging
