Peter Jackson, the New Zealand-born director famous for his stunning Lord of the Rings trilogy, made his first movie on a shoestring budget. Starring his mates, and featuring a broad array of home-made special effects, props and pyrotechnics, Bad Taste still stands up as a testament to what an ingenious all-rounder can achieve through perseverance.
The project started out as an attempt to make custom bodywork for his bevel-drive Ducati racebike - but as would become a pattern, Britten found that the Ducati engine and frame weren’t up to his standards. Eventually he decided to design a bike to be effective from the ground up.
Weight saving being a crucial consideration, Britten used every opportunity to make components serve double duties; there was no frame to speak of, the swingarm bolted to the rear of the engine and the odd but effective girder-style front-end to the front of it. Everything that could be spun from carbon fibre was, and the engine was designed, cast and heat-treated in the garage using water from Britten’s swimming pool for cooling.
Free from legacy design constraints, Britten was able to conceive the whole project in a unified manner and eliminate compromises inherent in the designs of the major manufacturers. The bike’s racing career had a couple of disastrous false starts - one at Daytona’s Battle of the Twins, where the bike retired from the lead due to a faulty regulator. It was a Ducati part, one of the few bits of the bike Britten didn’t design and build himself.
But once the V1000 got a roll on, it proved extremely difficult to beat, taking out the International BEARS World Championship in 1995 against the big-budget international factories, stunning the world with its sped and agility. A string of successes was to follow, earning the bike a reputation as the fastest four-stroke motorcycle in the world.
The achievement of one man - a hobbyist, no less, taking on the major manufacturers and consistently beating them - was as unthinkable in the 1990s as it would be today. Who knows what Britten might have been able to achieve had his life not been cut short by skin cancer in 1995. The bike continued racing for several years, but the Britten Motorcycle Company eventually ran out of steam without its most valuable asset.
Only 12 Britten racebikes were ever built - which is what makes these photos so special. They were taken last weekend in Christchurch, New Zealand by my good friend Roger Lawrence. The 12 Britten bikes in existence have been highly sought after by collectors, as befits the incredible story behind them, their racing success and the ingenuity of their design. One was even displayed in the Guggenheim Museum’s “Art of the Motorcycle” exhibition. The others are spread out all across the globe - so to assemble 5 of them at one race meeting definately rates as a significant and historic moment.
These photos are from the Christchurch Sounds of Thunder race meeting, where one of the bikes was taken out for several parade laps before an adoring crowd who were well aware of the machine’s significance. They may never race again, but Britten’s masterworks serve not only to remind us of the great leaps the major manufacturers are yet to take in motorcycle design, but of what is possible given a brilliant mind and determined persistence.
This video shows the amazing backyard construction of the bike, as well as some great race footage and interviews that give a fantastic insight into the humble genius of its creator:
And this is from the BBC’s top 20 greatest motorcycles of all time - where the V1000 is ranked at #6:
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