The 500-cc parallel-twin AJS E90 Porcupine is the rarest and most exotic factory road racer ever entered by a British factory in Grand Prix racing — and also, in some ways, the most frustrating. Yet its position in history is assured, as the first-ever winner of the premier class 500 cc World Championship (which later mutated into MotoGP) exactly 75 years ago this year, with British rider Les Graham winning the world title aboard the AJS in 1949. Indeed, the AJS is still the only twin-cylinder bike ever to have won the 500 GP world title — singles did it later, and triples and fours too, of course, but never another twin. The AJS Porcupine was both first and last.
That six-race 1949 World Championship series had started badly for the AJS works team, when Graham led the Senior TT for almost the entire race before breaking down on the run to the flag with a broken magneto drive, and pushing in from Hilberry to finish tenth. The Isle of Man was not a happy place for Porcupine riders, who only once (in 1951) in the bike’s eight-year racing career ever succeeded in even finishing on the podium there.
ENOUGH POINTS FOR THE WIN
But Les Graham took victory in the Swiss GP on Berne’s gruelling and slippery cobblestoned Bremgarten circuit, to record
