Genius? Madman? John Britten created one of the most amazing motorcycles on the planet and beat the world's biggest manufacturers--All from a tiny country in the southern hemisphere. We called The Britten V1000 "The World's Most Advanced Motorcycle" and it seemed to have come from nowhere. Technical Editor Kevin spent time with John Britten, and Cycle World track tested and raced this motorcycle. Kevin and Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer dive into the legends and mythology around the great Britten motorcycle and the man who led its creation.
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SportsTranscript
00:00welcome to the cycle world podcast i'm mark hoyer editor-in-chief i'm with kevin cameron
00:04our technical editor before we get started today just a quick shout out for the cycle world
00:09merchandise get yourself a hat get yourself a shirt get yourself the ice care motorcycle
00:15special edition it's all either down there in the description or it could be on the side one
00:20of the sides in the description we don't know what google does we don't know why
00:23but we got to use them it's a sacred mystery yeah it is with the algorithm but uh
00:32we're here to talk about motorcycles so we'll do get yourself a hat and um support the program
00:38support kevin cameron's uh i don't know td1 restoration shall we say
00:43and uh my terrible habit for burning uh high octane uh this week's episode is about the britain v1000
00:55v1100 and john britain the man because the motorcycle of course wouldn't exist without the person who made
01:02it um this motorcycle predates my uh career and oddly no one invited me to ride one at the time because
01:14i was busy crashing my rd 400 i'm sure of it um but we did uh we did a few years ago um nick
01:22einatch who's uh contributed to cycle world for a very long time and has a long career and in riding
01:27and racing and uh second in the 250 grand prix national championship in the uh ama uh very accomplished
01:35rider and someone who's ridden oh just about everything he said yeah he is
01:42um when you pull the so this is his ride from 2016 when you pull the trigger on this bike the
01:50sounds of heaven crashed down to accompany the rapidly advancing blue and pink machine it wants
01:56to wheelie out of any second or third gear corner with the slightest suggestion at the clip-ons the
02:00harder you push the bike the better it feels more speed and tire loads put this bike into its element and
02:07i went ahead and tucked in hung off pin the throttle and ran it to redline and maximize the brakes
02:13there's a mesmerizing effect this bike has that no other bike can match
02:18he talked about the power about the revs coming up and um
02:27he said it was a mechanical jet-like symphony unlike anything he's ever felt heard or sensed
02:34um it really did you know i i reread your piece uh from daytona and uh you uh you described the wheelies
02:44at in places on the track that no other bikes were wheeling i think it was coming coming out on the
02:50banking or something um so you got to meet john britain and not only just meet him and and talk about
02:58you know the excellence of butter or cooking or gravy or whatever it was actually you know you really
03:05spent some time with him so let's let's uh hear about that a little bit kevin well i didn't know
03:12anything about the man until i got to daytona and found that everyone was talking about him and that
03:17he was there so i went round to the garage and in due course was uh introduced into the presence
03:29and what i found was a a person of disarming boyish enthusiasm i'd like to work from first principles
03:39he practically put into the first sentence that he spoke to me and what he had just accomplished in
03:47making the first of his series of unusual motorcycle designs was that he'd rejected everything except
03:56round wheels and had put in their places the front suspension the chassis the engine the aerodynamics
04:06he had put in their places substitutes that worked better than the what was then the established practice
04:16now that's quite a font of creative work and i sort of said well what i'm seeing here suggests that you
04:30have never slept in your life oh he said again quite enthusiastically i i like to work in in periods of
04:39five weeks i sleep four or five hours a night and and i'm able to keep my train of thought going and and
04:48then i have to take a rest and let's look at the chassis that he created he threw away all that tubing and
05:00beams and all of the convention of the time and instead he attached to the cylinder heads of the v-twin
05:09twin 60 degree v-twin engine machined aluminum spools and also to the headstock and then he wrapped
05:24carbon fiber roving around these spools making a triangulated array of what i thought of as bones
05:34and once that had been uh properly wetted out and bound in place and what have you it was sheeted in
05:46with flat sheets of carbon kevlar fabric and now that i'm saying this it's beginning to sound a lot like
05:56ducati's 2009 black pyramid the carbon fiber chassis that was so rigid that um casey stoner couldn't
06:08couldn't couldn't ride it but once this chassis was cured once the carbon fiber and the
06:20resin holding it all together was cured it became a sort of skin and bones
06:27uh affair and it was just a little thing just a little thing then he decided i don't like the cooling
06:34system he rejected that whole thing we're going to put a radiator in front of the engine where it's in
06:40the shadow the air shadow of the front wheel so he just ran a duct to the back of the motorcycle and
06:49put the radiator horizontally under his under the seat and because the radiator was now receiving
06:58um full impact pressure whatever q happened to be as they motored along uh the intake for the radiator
07:10instead of being like something off a full rigged ship became a little hole
07:18and the fork uh was a girder fork again made from carbon fiber
07:24but he said i've noticed that the alternative front ends that other people are building
07:30spook the rider because they behave oddly so i designed mine so it would feel like a telescopic
07:36at least for the first couple inches of travel so from one point to the next to the next to the next
07:44uh he had changed everything and he had put in their places something better and
07:56this is quite a performance
08:00and of course then the motorcycle began its career well it already had a career of
08:07flattering only to deceive it did have some stunning success it showed that it was fabulously fast
08:15and that if there had been the equivalent of a factory reliability program like for example honda's 2600
08:25hour product proving cycle all those little 99-cent failures that really bugged poor old john out of his mind
08:36would have been trampled to death but i felt an immediate kinship with this man because he
08:46first of all he's working with motorcycles when you work with motorcycles you know
08:51that you're not trying to make a big difference in the human condition that's been advertised to me all my life
08:59is that we must all get out there and do something about the human experiment but
09:05all those who have devoted their lives to such projects have
09:12have been desperate persons it's not an easy task maybe it's better to focus on something you can
09:21understand and john was able to prove that he could control this small piece of reality and i think that
09:31has immense value on the other hand he didn't do it all himself even though um well that's the myth
09:40that's the mythology the mythology is this genius from you know new zealand on a shoestring budget
09:49yes came and came and smashed everyone but in fact you know he he far from worked alone and
09:54having been to new zealand i have friends in new zealand i sold a car years ago that was exported
09:59new zealand and the people who bought it tracked me down and asked me about the car and i wrote
10:04them a tremendous letter like a 20 20 000 word letter on a manual typewriter about the history
10:10of the car what i did with it was an austin healy and later i went down there to visit and drove the
10:16car really nice people and as anyone who would be buying an austin healy in new zealand you know they
10:22were gearheads they were you know this guy was a really fantastically clever machinist and you name it
10:28like he he built his own little uh little traction engine that ran off spirits and a flame and it would
10:34suck it in yes and it would just and he just did it uh he didn't have a design he just did it he thought
10:40oh that looks about right and that's you know they were cut off for a long long time new zealand was
10:44just the bottom of the world and they didn't have access like if you wanted to buy a hydraulic jack
10:50to jack up your car it was it was insanely expensive to get it into the country and so they just
10:57learned to work with the things they had and old lathes and all that stuff and so there is this
11:02very can-do attitude down there and it was easy yeah yeah it was it was easy and attractive
11:12to think of john britain as a lone genius pouring engine cases in his backyard you know yeah and you we
11:20i mean that's the story i want to hear but in fact it was as with anything it's a it's takes you
11:26know it takes that village of expertise and and support in so many ways he had
11:33such charm and such confident enthusiasm that it appears that he was able to enslave half of the
11:43nation and there were people but gradually uh over conversations and talking with other people
11:53associated with him i learned that if he couldn't mesmerize people into working for him he'd just pay them
12:04and i relaxed immediately because that's more believable and then i i picked up one of those
12:13architectural digest type magazines the magazine cost more than my house uh and there was john's
12:24house that he had built out of an old military stables well of course it looked like the un and it was
12:30clear that one man working weekends did not build this so i realized that there was more to the story and
12:40the poor man put everything into these projects into trying to get them before the right public into
12:53trying to interest people in buying 30 engines into he had robert iannucci uh trying to persuade harley
13:03davidson to have a sniff and all of this tremendous effort while trying to make the motorcycle reliable they had
13:16a digital engine control that just wouldn't stop stopping and people worked on it and it seemed all of
13:26as well as voltage spikes or oh well they're um internal shorts we think it may be humidity inside the case
13:35and what you need for that is a department of of people doing boring and repetitive testing
13:45sure and your nichicon capacitors let me tell you you got to get the right capacitors i'm just saying okay
13:50okay so uh those those boring things only got done very gradually as john attracted one after another
14:06brilliant specialist who could help him and the last time i spoke with him we went to lunch in
14:16daytona and he said now when uh this motorcycle thing is is drawing to a close now and what i want
14:23to work on next is a man-powered um human-powered airplane and he said i think the people that are trying
14:31to do this are doing it all wrong because a propeller is a huge waste of um propulsive efficiency because
14:40it's accelerating a small mass of air to a high speed can't do that said that's why birds have wings instead
14:48of propellers so uh then i heard that that he'd lost a rider at the isle of man and that he was horribly
14:59depressed by it and then i heard that he had a terrible disease and then i heard that he was gone
15:04and the the people who had been helping him were sure that the the golden excellence of this project would
15:17make it live on it didn't it became a collector piece and there the matter rests but what this shows
15:28is that a person can have a set of ideas about a system a motorcycle in this case that are
15:40notably superior to those generally received at the time and further can prove it and that's
15:48tremendously encouraging on the other hand if we read the tim hannah biography we find out that
15:54uh john had human characteristics imagine yes which causes causes us to say let him without who is
16:05without sin cast the first stone yeah because well one one of the people that i met in the circle around
16:16john britain said oh wouldn't it be wonderful if someone like john could be involved with moto gp and
16:24i said i'm afraid john would find moto gp a prison and a bore because the equipment would have to be ready
16:36for first practice no no questions asked it would have to be in perfect condition there would have to be
16:43team discipline and there would be no room for for suddenly deciding to try a new idea because
16:52racing is incrementalism we're going to make small bets that have some possibility of moving us toward
17:00the goal of higher performance but we're not going to put on an alternative front end we're not going
17:05to make a skin and bones chassis and we're not going to put the radiator underneath the rider well as you said
17:11a hundred percent doesn't make the grid and certainly a hundred and ten percent and i don't mean that in the
17:17traditional sense but 110 percent would never make the grid right it just you know you have to uh
17:24i mean i think you know i think about that moto cis project with the the 15 degree v that michael
17:30says was making and yep and his variable trail and alternative front end and it's sort of like rotating
17:36crank shafts yeah i mean you know some very interesting ideas there but you know is that
17:44is that is that actually what's needed it or wanted or successful in racing probably not you know yeah
17:54um i thought about i thought you know as you were describing all of this like what all of john
18:00britain's accomplishments what would that look like you know with a support system in moto gp or why why
18:09if these ideas were superior why don't moto gp bikes look like britain's you know sure so um
18:21i'd like to get into some of the technical detail um you know you talked about the cooling system and
18:26you know what we're accustomed to seeing is a huge radiator often curved going down filling every possible
18:35uh area almost the whole front of the fairing yeah whole front of the fairing behind the wheel
18:41and now behind uh strakes winglets donut holes etc all that stuff um and britain put a hole in the
18:52fairing at the high pressure point yep and ran a duct straight through basically to the radiator
18:59and that was the pressure side of the radiator and then he ducted it out into the great big hole that
19:07the motorcycle was punching creating negative pressure fill the vacuum filling the vacuum with
19:14this high pressure heated now air coming out the tailpipe so to speak from under the rider and making some
19:23contribution certainly a a great aero contribution because everything that was everything that
19:30couldn't be made exceptionally skinny was basically stuck into the pill like the torpedo
19:37i think what did you describe it as a torpedo on top of a knife or something like that yeah yeah
19:43torpedo on top of a knife and so this and that was one of the great things about it is the frontal area
19:48was incredibly small and then the pieces of the frontal area were being put to use
19:53like high pressure to get into the cooling system and to make a smaller radiator work and then reducing
20:00aero and so yeah john took his motorcycles to a 20 mile straight piece of road in the part of new
20:10zealand where the local authorities could be persuaded to close the road for an hour
20:17pretty nice like bonneville in your backyard so uh that's where
20:23he decided that the lower fairing was making his bike slower not faster and so he did away with
20:31the lower fairing and then he decided that it was valuable to have high velocity air passing between
20:40the rider's lower rider's calves and the engine and he said basically my view is that a motorcycle
20:50is such a disturbance that trying to streamline it without having the the tail airplanes have a tail fish have a tail all the that tail is like a tapered bar of wet soap if you squeeze that if if your hand is air
21:09pressure and you squeeze that yeah it's going to produce thrust well if you can't have a tail
21:17on a motorcycle well then the fastest fish are the long fish right how long can we make the motorcycle right
21:22yes that's right there are limits and uh i mean eric buell isn't wrong to say my favorite wheelbase is 54 inches
21:34aggo agostini's favorite wheelbase was 53 and a half
21:40so uh all such refined tastes you know john concluded that he should hammer frontal area he should just
21:52try to get rid of as much frontal area as possible because the motorcycle was not going to end up with a
21:57good um aerodynamic coefficient and what an aerodynamic coefficient is it says in comparison with a piece of
22:08plywood being crammed flat on through the air having the same oh you mean a a road glide
22:16a bag of race bike yeah those those those bmws that have a kitchenette yeah in front of the rider it's
22:28wonderful but uh his view was that since you can't clean it up very much that you should just make it as
22:36as small as possible and of course feet twin in line four uh uh in line six no way
22:46but of course honda's six of 1967 and 68 was 12.4 inches the crankshaft was just a little narrow thing
22:57so uh that was that was john's deal with with aerodynamics and
23:06it's a it's a it's a hard argument to refute
23:13so
23:13uh he went from one finally he decided he didn't like metal wheels metal wheels didn't make any
23:22sense to him he said when you've worked with the directional materials you begin to develop a distrust
23:29of metals metals metals seem like really tightly packed sand and of course what he was referring
23:37to is polycrystalline metals and all the weaknesses in the spaces between the crystal grains the
23:48intergranular zone and if you if you use a directional material that is basically a crystal
23:55there's no intergranular zone the same thing was done in the aviation industry when they found that
24:01all their problems with turbine blades failures of various kinds erosion blah blah blah all the boring
24:09stuff that john wouldn't want wouldn't have wanted to deal with uh had to do with the intergranular zone
24:16so let's get it out of here so they made single crystal turbine blades that was a john britain like leap
24:24so uh he's he said when i'm when i'm building a shape like the the gas tank or the frontal fairing or
24:36what have you he said i i use soft aluminum wire and a glue gun to stick it together and then i sheet
24:44it over with urethane and then he said i sand it and make a mold
24:49and when he says all this it makes it seem like it's going to take 22 minutes
24:58and yet if you've ever done any of these kinds of things you know that's not the case so you've got
25:05to have those volunteers who yes it's four in the morning but we're all cheerful aren't we
25:13and we're going to get it done so um
25:22one of the one of the wonderful scenes that i remember from the first time that i met john was
25:26that here came the late homer knapp homer knapp had a machine shop that was like um
25:34kenny augustine shop there was just room to walk between the various tools there was a superstar he
25:40really was yes he was an la institution they're young guys that were trying to race a honda ascot
25:48engine whose crankshaft persistently turned into a two-piece they go to homer and homer says well
25:55there's these three different options that you could choose and young guys i've got the money
26:01do you have the time and so he did these off the wall things so homer and john britain took turns
26:11pulling interesting stuff out of their pockets and discussing them together john had a dfv
26:20connecting rod from a cosworth formula one engine and he said when i thought well what rod ratio shall i
26:27give my engine i looked at this 1.8 well that's good enough all right that's decided
26:34and homer had all sorts of stuff in his pockets and it just went on like this it was
26:42these people you see have no one to talk to yeah they go home uh to the family they're not going to be
26:51able to talk about horizontal ducted radiators um so john and homer just had a ball
27:02and lest you should think that that um john was just a uh uh another kind of shop machine
27:12there he was working away in his garage and there came a loud yell and it was i think gary goodfellow's
27:22baby was in a bassinet by the door and the sun had swung around so that it was right in the baby's face
27:31john saw immediately what was going on and he went and moved the baby into the shade
27:36so he had a theory of mind if i were that baby i would be yelling too yes and so
27:50these these
27:55episodes of
27:58enthusiastic innovation
28:00contrast with the difficulty of keeping a group of people together on a common task
28:11on a volunteer or near volunteer basis
28:16and when it comes to
28:19shoestrings it's a hell of a shoestring that could bring the size
28:22crew and the air freight that he had in daytona all the way from new zealand
28:28so
28:32it became clear that his family had money and that uh he was a
28:40financially able person
28:42yeah
28:43and but that that does not detract from the from the
28:48fluid ease with which
28:53novel and workable ideas poured forth because i've known
28:57a lot of the guys who
29:00who basically
29:02tried to stay up for the rest of their life building a project bike filled with their own ideas
29:08and they imagined they were going to ride it to glorious victory
29:13and
29:14nothing happened because they ran out of money because the wife left
29:19because the rent on the workspace
29:23wasn't forthcoming
29:25these people made incredible sacrifice of their personal lives
29:30for their projects
29:32but in general the projects failed to produce
29:36anything
29:37whereas again and again the britain motorcycles would streak into the lead
29:43and
29:45there were some wins but there were a lot of dnfs
29:48a lot of really
29:50depressing dnfs
29:52so
29:55as a as an mo for creating the future
30:00uh no corporation would touch this
30:02but
30:05john made it clear that it was a possible way to go
30:10yeah
30:12i find what you said interesting about the connecting rod
30:15thought of saying like well i have this dfv
30:19connecting rod and it's 1.8 ratio and away we go
30:24and i think
30:25i always find that fascinating
30:28i'm not an engineer
30:30i'm a mechanic and i like working on things and i like you know i mean i've
30:34i've gone pretty deep on some projects
30:37but um you have to choose your battles and
30:41figuring out connecting rod ratio is something that someone else has spent a billion hours working on
30:46such as cosworth
30:47and why not pick that one like the ripe fruit that it is and focus on the other things that
30:55you you think you can have an impact on still his engine ran great and i'm curious as to
31:02what you think the difference was between the britain v1000 and and some of the other bikes of the
31:07period and what you know nick einatch described as
31:12pulling in a way and having power that he hasn't experienced really and i think
31:17you know certainly there was the lightness factor right the bike was exceptionally light
31:22but you know what is it about that powertrain design that cylinder i guess cylinder heads really
31:27but bore and stroke are important and well i think what was going on at that time was that
31:34the v-twin revolution was uh just little green spikes coming up in the garden and the ducatis 851 had
31:44overcome opposition from dr talioni uh he didn't like four valves um there were a lot of things that he didn't like and uh massimo bordi the young upstart
32:02uh was able to prevail because the 851 was the first ducati that ever produced 100 horsepower
32:10first ever and it was clearly going places and because the ducati was
32:21moving forward in this way and the formula said you can have a 750 cc four-cylinder or a thousand cc
32:28twin any kind of twin you like and i think that
32:34that no one had really done the numbers to see whether a twin that turned modern rpm
32:45could compete with a 750 inline four and john did
32:52and eraldo ferracci did i mean he was the man behind the 888 and made it win races what a legend
33:02well and and and he's still just he's still himself yeah yeah he has no he he hasn't retreated behind
33:11some corporate yeah you know he isn't disappearing into an immense audi chauffeur driven car
33:20oh no but um i think at that time that that the v-twin as an alternative to the inline four was
33:32john britain was exploring it massimo bordi was exploring it there may have been others
33:38but things were happening so fast that it was it was breathtaking and i think that's what knocked
33:45people over uh the v-twin uh the v-twin john realized that you couldn't just build a top-end motor
33:57and so he was aware that the
34:01part of the intake port that just upstream from the valve had to be small enough so that that air was
34:07moving at a speed so high that when the piston began to rise on compression but the intake valves
34:16were still open that that air would just keep rushing in there and finally the air would stop
34:22and say was i was i doing something and then the valves would close and the cylinder would be
34:30filled with mixture so i think it had some mid-range
34:37because he was he was conscious of that uh they have daytona only in daytona but in
34:46new zealand and australia the racetracks have have curves
34:50some of them to the right so it's uh i think that that the phenomenon of the britain had to do with
35:00what a surprise it was for a twin to be doing things that inline fours couldn't do
35:06so um
35:13very intoxicating time yeah i mean nick nick raced against uh you know big four cylinders and uh it
35:20had the measure of those bikes absolutely did you talked about the um the building up the way he uh
35:28the way john britain built up the cylinder head oh that way he was so pleased with that well i mean why
35:35wouldn't you be and it's so it's just like it's so practical and so
35:41doable and he took a block of plexiglass and he machined the combustion chamber and the valve seats
35:49and then he put pieces of aluminum tubing where the bolts would go to retain the head and all of the
35:56services and then he said all right the intake ports will have to go in this space that's left
36:04and he built up the intake ports by ring by ring and at each step he would try
36:13to optimize the flow and he said of this method i'm really rather chuffed about this
36:22who couldn't be charmed by that yeah and and then of course
36:27that offhanded thing that he said to me um when this motorcycle thing is over with i i plan to devote
36:35myself to uh human-powered aircraft it was like okay that's boring now
36:42to do something else and that's what robin to louis said about formula one he said that
36:52uh he'd lost interest in it
36:53and this was this was a local madman in minneapolis building uh weird specials with
37:03snowmobile engines and because he was working for um mts who were frequent hosts to formula one teams
37:13who wanted to put their cars on their seven post shakers
37:18the reno people said who's this guy here he he seems to know well really a lot
37:27and so he was whisked away to uh to the formula one zone in england and was there ever since then he
37:35was what chief scientist at mercedes formula one so these characters
37:41he was just a dude that loved motorcycles it takes them it takes a lot to entertain them he's he just
37:47loved motorcycles the special that uh you mentioned was the two laris which was a polaris snowmobile
37:55engine two-stroke 800 ish yeah and uh stuck into uh his his own chassis and uh and my what a beast it
38:05was we have a beautiful feature on it from the day just gorgeous gorgeous photos and uh
38:11parallel twin right yeah yeah parallel twin and uh just so anyway and he went on from just
38:19wanting to do this and he was you know he was a vibration and frequency guy yeah and they were
38:25looking at they were looking at all the things that freak you know you don't think about this
38:29like oh my bike vibrates and like what can i do i'll stick some lead shot in the handlebars or
38:34snake through and and we just think of it this way and when you get somebody who goes to
38:39what do you call them what kind of principles first first principles you know uh chatter on
38:46the fork uh any damping any any um any cycling any vibration it all has a frequency and that's kind of
38:54where robin really put his head yeah and that's why they were using the shaker table and what could
39:00they do with the suspension that would smooth the passage of the vehicle down the road and increase the
39:06grip and all the grip and all the things and he made a a really great career out of it he showed me
39:13uh i visited mts once and he showed me a motorcycle on a two-post shaker and he said let's make a
39:24frequency sweep and as he did so uh the shift pedal disappeared and then it reappeared as the frequency
39:35rose past its frequency and the luggage carrier or some other thing began to to disappear and finally
39:42it was the front end that was whipping forwards and back at about what would it be 20 22 cycles or
39:49something and it just gives you a completely different view of what a motorcycle is and that is why in so
39:59many cases the engineers refer to certain parts by their frequency and not by their proper name
40:08and this also caused the the ducati people to refer to the diavel engine as the 11 degree because
40:15race engines have this huge valve overlap where both the intakes and exhausts are open together
40:23for a brief period around top dead center but in order to pass the emissions you had to close up that
40:30overlap and preserving performance while doing away with overlap is what's given us this modern i like
40:40to call it a euro five power band it's just flat yeah was it not uh gordon jennings who uh who taped
40:49led to his carburetors to oh absolutely we've all done that we've all the carburetors vibrating so much
40:55it's it stops fueling properly turning the fuel into froth yeah and it doesn't come out the jets right
41:00and you know if you're racing a two-stroke that can have disastrous consequences any bike really but
41:06it's worse than a two-stroke yep and that's a that's a thing you uh you fight with all the time on on
41:12almost anything you do is those is those vibrations robin to louis be a would be a great show no question
41:19yeah uh well john britain of course perished from the earth and in 1995 and it's
41:32i was so sorry when when peter williams had his had his accident and sort of disappeared from
41:41public affairs because i had a conversation with peter at daytona that had the same excitement and sense of
41:49having met a wonderful source of of all the things that i consider good and it just seemed like
41:59like like a crime that he was just you know the old hook comes out around the neck and he's pulled
42:07off stage yeah so because peter had had one idea after another and they were ideas that could be
42:14implemented using a norton parallel twin to push the result along the road and what do you think
42:24has worked yeah what do you what do you think unites that um it's just is it a manner of thinking i mean
42:33you have to have a base curiosity but there's also there's more to it well john and i discussed this
42:41and i said to him at one point i always find it curious that there is a
42:47a uh an aesthetic of circuit board design there are things you don't do because we circuit board
42:54designers don't do that that shows mental weakness there there are obviously mathematicians have an
43:04aesthetic and it usually especially early coders you know people who are writing programming for chips
43:10that had virtually no memory you had no memory elegant elegant and really efficient yes that and
43:17now it's just like all these overlays and wizards and you click and it's just all this we have so
43:22much extra storage and object-oriented programming yeah just like blah just like a vomit of code we'll
43:29crush it with zeros and ones tell you as a guy who runs a website we will not crush it with zeros
43:35it's such a pain in the ass everything all the coding getting laid over over years you're like
43:40why is this breaking we don't know why things just disappear or god it's just well that was where that
43:46was where uh digital flight control came from because they had so many such a pile of band-aids built
43:52to control the airplane finally the band-aids fell over their interactions with each other like you
43:58you know being on 26 drugs anyway what john said about the the separate aesthetics of different fields
44:06of human endeavor he said i think that if we could know enough we would know that there's only one
44:13aesthetic and it has application of special nature to each area just described religion well i mean
44:25it is it's your it's one aesthetic usually it's one it's you know we all we focus on the perfection
44:31of god yes and of his eternal plan um which it would be lovely to be able to leave it to an entity like
44:40that but we seem to have some responsibility of our own and it's full-time job well i gotta ducati's
44:47gotta carry me home i want it to run right you sure do but i i still have my eyes on some smaller goals
44:53than eternity i think yes so i love that if we could know enough i suspect there's only one aesthetic
45:02no it's beautiful and it it has to do with getting to the heart of things to the effective
45:11minimum statement of whatever it is uh the thing that the circuit board people don't want is jumpers
45:19if you thought it right around if you've located the components properly you can wire it on the board
45:27if you have to use jumpers it just shows you're weak-minded and and of course there are projects
45:34where you know there's people saying oh we need another six weeks of uh troubleshooting
45:41meanwhile they're thundering on the door ship it we got to ship this and so uh we don't get to know
45:49what that single aesthetic is but i was delighted to find that john was had had time for that
45:58well as you say uh tragedy gone too soon we didn't get to see the ornithopter true the flying bird powered
46:12by a person well i was just thinking the other night that there are so many birds who which when they're on
46:20takeoff power their wingtips touch above the body and below the body so they're just reciprocating
46:28propeller blades which are also producing lift it's brilliant yeah and it only took four billion years
46:40right so well um i really appreciate you sharing the things that you know and i'm glad that we could uh
46:48talk about somebody like john britain and of course he was human and of course there were many different
46:53angles that all would come together and almost any time you put someone's name on the motorcycle
46:59your own there has to be a driving force you know eric buell definitely a driving force definitely a
47:06driving force yes harley and the davidsons i mean you know if your name's on the motorcycle imagine what
47:13it would have been to be around at that time in the shed yes that does not happen
47:18because we should go get a beer and a bratwurst right because that's not the first thing on our
47:23mind and so uh you gotta finish this yeah um the remarkable spirit and then the you know for britain
47:31seeing his remarkable spirit and ability to charm people and all that expressed into such an elegant
47:40and effective tool it had its flaws for sure but you know what if you could have been dealt with if there
47:47had been uh that kind of facility behind him but i think that he did fabulously with the bare minimum
47:59and they were very good at trying to uh snatch success from the from the jaws of failure as for example
48:08trying to braise a cast iron cylinder liner just sitting out in the open air no no preheating muff no
48:18no nothing what we had to we had to do it would be their response so they did do it yeah and necessity is
48:26it is a tremendous um motivation so i think they put themselves on this construct of their of of their
48:38collective mind which was to make this motorcycle successful and they they couldn't allow it to fail
48:44and of course it did fail it never went into production it never did they didn't sell 30 engines they
48:52didn't sell uh dozens of bikes but it wasn't for one of one yeah i mean you're when you say it failed
49:01it failed commercially yes but in but dynamically it did not an expression of of human activity it was a
49:09brilliant success brilliant success and uh beautiful and otherworldly like just mind-blowing to see the
49:18pink and purple and how come it doesn't have a fairing man you know one year one year at daytona i
49:24showed up just as they were starting they got their bike out of the crate and they gassed it up and aired it
49:31up and they had it on the rollers and it started up and it just made this tremendous incoherent gobbling
49:38noise and i said john what's that about he said oh it's not mapped below 3000 i was do you think it
49:46should be i was just gonna say that like boring like why would what what for like why would we
49:523004 yeah that's so emblematic so uh that that's really yeah what what yeah well it's like talking
50:01to you about mid-range and an rd350 uh porting job when i say mid-range and i say well yeah i just
50:08want to you know run uh you know i want to kind of pull 3500 maybe maybe four grand and you look at me
50:13and go four that was when i was in your shop and we were we were porting the rd350 and and uh you
50:22know we just had a different mindset about what was well what you discover when you when you dig
50:28into those things is that it's an organ pipe yeah and that organ pipe is it comes out of the front
50:34of the cylinder and passes under the chassis and that organ pipe has a very narrow range in which it
50:41can boost the airflow of the engine and when you're in that boost range it goes like a rocket and if you're
50:48out of that boost range the best you can hope for well we put a reed valve in it so that it doesn't
50:53blow all the mixture back out the intake so that's a plus and it kind of will grr along but it's not
51:01pulling no it's just like a motorized parade float at that point this becomes a motorcycle above
51:098500 but right now we're trying to get to where we can do that just waiting to whisker a plug yes
51:15and we'll have a show where we talk about what's a whiskered plug anyway because no one knows
51:21anymore nobody knows anymore but there's a lot of good stories there and an entire priesthood most of
51:28whom are dead but uh the way things are looking right now motorcycles might not be immortal either
51:37and so we have to just cope with the idea that there were these wonderful technologies
51:42fascinating people worked with them had ideas about them and then it was swept away by a rules
51:51change or by the clean air act of 1970 or by some other act of god but the thing about life is not
52:00gold but living and those people lived yep
52:05all right everybody thanks for listening on that note we will we will catch you next time
52:14you can tune in for the whiskered plug program or any other version of uh you name it it's coming
52:21any other version of our religion which is motorcycling and um thanks so much for listening uh
52:27this program in fact was the result of someone asking in the comments could we do a program about
52:33britain i think it was it may have been on the uh the recent harley podcast which is why harley
52:39sells millions of motorcycles so you can uh hit the playlist on uh youtube you can find us on uh
52:45spotify and apple podcasts and uh go back in the history we've got many many episodes now
52:52and we're gonna keep carrying on thanks everybody catch you next time yep