You may recognise the general profile of the Norton rotary racer pictured here, but this isn't an upgraded, roadgoing F1 or one of the original racebikes. It's a new version of the liquid-cooled, twin rotor racer. This revised NRV 588 is the work of Brian Crighton, the man who originally persuaded Norton's Shenstone factory to start racing its rotary-engined machines in 1987. Their presence set British racetracks alight, drawing huge crowds and Crighton's peak achievement was in 1994, when his Nortons sponsored by Duckhams Oils dominated the UK's premier Superbike championship. The winner that year was Ian Simpson, with team mate Phil Borley only missing second place by one point.
t's been 20 years since the rotary engine invented by German engineer Felix Wankel back in 1924 made its motorcycle roadracing debut in 1987. Powering the racebikes of the resurgent Norton factory, the rotary's then-superior performance led to eight years of competition that resulted in successive British roadrace titles, points-scoring GP finishes and victory in the Isle of Man TT against the top superbikes of the day. The fact that each Wankel engine cylinder has only three moving parts that simply rotate-compared with myriad moving pieces in a conventional four-stroke piston engine, many of which run at incredibly high velocities only to stop dead a couple of hundred times a second-makes this a plausibly more efficient mechanical solution. Admittedly, the thorny issue of the bike's exact engine capacity was always a matter of controversy. Because the rotary engine's unique three-sided rotor's power stroke occurs twice during a revolution of the crankshaft (actually called the eccentric shaft, basically a camshaft around which the rotor orbits), some claimed that its displacement should be measured by the single rotor-face-swept area of each of the Norton Wankel's two triangular rotors times two. Nonetheless the rules were massaged on an ongoing basis to make sure the crowd-pleasing Nortons could play their role as British underdogs taking on the might of Japan Inc.
