40 years ago, rider/designer Peter Williams won the 1973 TT F750 with the ‘revolutionary’ – for those times – Norton John Player Special, basically the first racer with a monocoque frame, and now the man responsible for the birth and success of that bike has announced that he is now planning to build and sell 25 replicas of the model through its newly founded Peter Williams Motorcycles.
This is not all though as the nice Mr.
Williams plans to ‘continue’ the project creating a also a brand new motorcycle, inspired by its famous predecessor but with a monocoque frame made of modern carbon and based on a concept developed by Williams in 1990, when he was working for Lotus.
For those not in the know, Peter Williams has a long history behind him: as a motorcycle racer, in 60s and 70s he managed to win a World GP race in the now defunct 350 cc classe and collected several podium finishes in the 500 cc world championship (to old premier class); as an engineer, he is responsible for the introduction of some new technologies in motorcycle racing such as alloy wheels and disc brakes.
The replicas of Williams’ old Norton John Player Special will be near-perfect copies of the original bike, which in 1973 also established a new lap record on the Mountain Course with an average of 107.
27 miles per hour (about 172.
63 km/h).
Some changes will be made to the stainless steel frame to make it less ‘complicated’ than that of the four original bikes, but all 25 units will be handmade just like the their predecessors.
The dry weight of the final version will be around 152 kg.
Quite obviously, the engine will be once again a 748 cc air-cooled parallel twin that will be realized in collaboration with Norton ’specialist’ Mick Hemmings, which used some drawings provided by Williams himself.
Wheels and forks too will be tailored to mimic the original, though further details will be announced later on.
It goes without saying that such a piece of work won’t come cheap: the final price should be in the 65,000 pounds area (76,400 euros at current exchange rates), which immediatly qualifies it as stuff for wealthy collectors only, but the money raised with the 25 JPN Replica will be invested in the realization of the aforementioned new model.
