The carcass of my Yamaha R6 race bike was clogging my garage and a buyer, Dan, had popped round to take the entire front end. As we speculated how to dubiously sling my frame to the garage roof, I asked Dan what his plans were for the yoke, fork and triple clamp assembly. “Ah, it's for a supermono I'm building.” I looked confused as my modest bike knowledge wouldn't fill in the blank. Assuredly, Dan explained that a supermono was single-cylinder engine, four-stroke, commonly found in motocross bikes, fitted to a customised track racing frame. Throw in some track suspension, something to stop it with and spare fairings and voila, you have yourself a supermono. Dan was doing what most supermono owners have done since the early 1980s, building his own bike around a single-piston thumper and racing this ‘shed-built special’ against his peers.
Supermonos had their heyday in the mid-1990s in the British and European Supermono Championships, and filled a grid in World Superbikes. With simple rules (maximum 800cc, four-stroke engine and minimum weight limit of 95kg) it was a prototyper's paradise, with Tigcraft, Harris and Spondon frames being matched with Suzuki 800s, Honda 450s and Rotax 600s. But the best one, and only pure race bike ever produced by Ducati, was the Ducati Supermono. Built from the ground up with Pierre Terblanche's design flair, Ducati built 67 stunning water-cooled, 550cc supermonos and won European championships on machines from a racing-focused production line. However, this single-cylinder class wasn't sustainable because major bike manufacturers couldn't pinpoint a road market to sell to, so the riders had to get their hands dirty and build them. Production line supermonos just didn't exist, until now. Welcome to the resurgence.
It's September, a late Indian summer vibe, ice cream meltingly warm, and I'm racing with the North Gloucestershire Road Racing Club. My machine is a Krämer EVO2, a box-fresh supermono with a KTM 690cc single from Austria and a custom frame, swingarm, tank and fairings from the German Krämer factory, plus a list of accessories that made me drool as much as I did over my now puddled ice cream. My first race on the Krämer was against a mixed grid of preinjection 600s and a handful of stock and super twins, all knees and elbows jostling into the first corner at Cadwell
