The Motorcycling Musketeer!

Just more than 20 years ago, on December 13, 2001, the motorcycle world lost one of its greatest free thinkers and most innovative engineers, when 46-year old Frenchman Claude Fior was tragically killed at the controls of his self-built private plane, after crashing in dense fog on approach to the runway at the Nogaro race circuit in southwest France.

With Fior’s death passed a man whose boundless creativity, matched by an appetite for fun, had graced the Grand Prix paddocks for more than a decade in the 1980s and 1990s, and whose capacity for original thought marked him as a radical force in alternative motorcycle design.

The distinctive Fior wishbone front suspension design, which dates back to 1976, has since been copied by designers all over the world, from Britain to New Zealand, Germany to Japan, and in the form of its volume-production derivative, BMW’s K-series Duolever fork, represents the most practical and widely accepted alternative to conventional motorcycle front suspension design yet brought to the streetbike marketplace.

Nogaro, where Fior lived, lies in the Armagnac region of southern France, the Gascon homeland of the romantic idealism which produced D’Artagnan and his swashbuckling Three Musketeer comrades, who in Hollywood scripts as well as Alexander Dumas’ novels became renowned for battling the dark forces of established order. A foe of convention and normality just like D’Artagnan, Claude Fior’s chosen weapons were not the sword or the rapier, but the pencil and the arc-welder, with which this unsung visionary created a proud portfolio of self-designed motorcycles which, despite budgetary obstacles, repeatedly proved the worth of his radical ideas out on the racetrack.

The Fior Concept workshop besideTurn Nine of the Nogaro GP circuit gave constant expression to the capacity of Claude Fior – universally known as ‘Pif’ – to match innovation with artistry, and combine quality of construction with a