Archives

The Spencer Evo

3 Replies

In the 16 years I’ve spent writing about motorcycles, among other things, I’ve come across hundreds of bikes I liked and dozens I’ve desired, but I’ve kept a lid on the lust. I have learned contentment is the real road to happiness and I was content with the couple of bikes I owned. I realise I am fortunate. Some people are lost if they don’t have the next automotive project to locate, charm and conquer. I try, when possible, to live by the mantra: ride them, don’t hide them, and having a whole fleet of polished cast alloy beauties has never appealed.

Have you tried looking after a bunch of motorcycles? It’s a tedious task. Their batteries go flat. Their tyres, too. Their road tax expires; they cost a bomb to insure; they are a pain to keep MoT'd, then when you do take them to the test station, you realise how little you have ridden the bike in question in the last 12 months. There is always something, and it manages to squeeze the joy out of ownership, for me at least. Owning ten motorcycles isn’t five times more fun than two, but it is at least five times the hassle.

So while I had access to the fine, fast and fanciful, I returned home to the loving enjoy the company of the garaged ones that knew me best.

Then I saw Steve’s Spencer Evo. It was unfinished. It looked like it would take a month's work to complete it, but it was actually another nigh on four years till I returned to the single garage in Cumbria in which it was built, to lay eyes on its recently completed form.

It was a day that changed my motorcycling life. It was a day when all the inspiration, all the clever touches, the craftsman-created pieces, the race-spec this, the drilled-titanium that and the Japanese Domestic Market-only elements my brain had been logging finally clicked like the Yale lock of a slammed door.

All bets were off. I had to build a bike like this. Three years later, I still am.


The Spencer Evo is infused with the restless spirit of Pops Yoshimura, creator of some of the most amazing superbikes ever ridden.

The Spencer Evo: Devilish Detail

5 Replies

The Spencer Evo has a hold on me. In a decade-and-a-half of travelling the motorcycle world looking at one-offs, specials and race machinery, it is the one motorcycle that has made the biggest impression on my life. It is the one that took years of carefully honed contentment and did a fourth gear burnout on its face. It is the perfect mix of glamour and attainability. It’s not Casey’s Desmosedici, yet, in my eyes, it’s as well built. I’m never going to own a factory MotoGP bike (and couldn’t keep its complex electronics working if I did), but I could imagine creating something like this. This machine has been built from the ground up. There are barely two components on the whole bike that have ever sat together before in their entire lives. That adds up to 2000 problems to solve.


The beauty of the Evo lies in its uncompromising mechanicity

The frame and swingarm were made to order by GIA in Nottinghamshire. It’s hand-bent, 7030 aerospace-grade aluminium alloy. Each joint was scrupulously cleaned before being TIG welded, by a man who has been making high-performance, alloy motorcycle frames for over 20 years. Every weld is a little example of perfection. I don’t believe in describing cars and bikes as works of art. They’re not. To me, they’re better than that, they are machines with a purpose. I’m not anti-art. I’m just very pro-machine. And while this machine isn’t art, those welds have a hyper-organic beauty only carefully melted metal can possess. The chassis has been anodised black, so all that beauty almost disappears. That’s the sign of a man who is building bikes for himself, not to enable him to splash in a shallow pool of public admiration.


High angled exhaust set-up not to everyone's taste but is phallically appealing...

The Spencer Evo is drenched in craftsmanship. Every nut, bolt and screw is titanium, including the swingarm pivot bolt and wheel spindles. The titanium fasteners alone cost well over £1000. Yet this isn’t a race bike, just the focus of an obsessive character. The shocks were made to order by Works Performance in California, while the carburettors are hideously expensive Yoshimura Mikuni TMR-MJNs personally imported from Japan. They run without filters.


Yoshimura-Mikuni special edition TMR-MJN carbs with fancy two-piece bellmouths. Try getting some to the UK for less than £3500.

The bodywork, and the special’s name, is designed to evoke images of the 1980-81 AMA Racing season – when Superbike racing went stratospheric. A time when budgets for this production bike racing class were close to unlimited. There was only so much you could do to a Honda CB900, Kawasaki Z1000 or Suzuki GS1000, and stay within the rules. There was a hell of a lot more you could do if you regarded those rules with all the disdain as sabre-tooth tiger could muster if presented with a Pizza Hut salad.

Full titanium Racefit exhaust system. Feather light.

The AMA seasons from 1980-83 helped launched the road racing careers of Eddie Lawson, Wayne Rainey and Freddie Spencer. The three of them would win a total of nine 500 GP world championships (and one 250 title). It was a special time, when engine’s out-performed chassis, and tyres were so hard they made sparks. Steve set out to build an evolution of the bike Spencer raced 30 years ago. This is not a replica. It is more of a manga interpretation. If Spencer rode Peter Parker, Steve built Spiderman.


MoTeC dash cost more than a good secondhand Fireblade.

And, because it isn’t a replica, but an interpretation, there was no wrong way to do it. So if he wanted to fit a Suzuki engine, no one was going to stop him. So he did. The engine is an 1157cc air and oil-cooled inline four from a GSF1200 Bandit. It’s extremely closely related to GSX-R1100s that date back to 1985. Needless to say, it’s not standard, but it hasn’t been excessively tuned.

The wheels are magnesium, and made in England by Dymag. The brakes are rare British Spondon one-piece calipers, long before the mainstream made them, Spondon discs and MotoGP spec master cylinders. The wiring loom is RAF jet aircraft-spec…

I could go, because not one single corner has been cut.

Spencer Evo: Action

4 Replies

The Spencer Evo XR1157R is a pure muscle bike. It is tense. Taut. Gym-honed to the point it could star alongside Jason Statham. It is, as a friend of mine used to say, very light on its wheels. Like it’s gently bouncing, Bruce Lee-style, on the balls of its feet, ready to roundhouse a lightning-quick kick to crack some unsuspecting goon’s jaw with a collection of titanium metatarsals wrapped in a espadrille.

Flick the ignition switch (nothing as ‘street bike’ as a key on this beast) and watch the World Superbike/ WRC-spec MoTeC dash – that alone cost more than my last three bikes combined – scroll the message ‘Hello Freddie’. This is, after all, the evolution of the bike a young Spencer raced in the USA. Huge slide carbs, not proletariat CVs, are primed with a couple of twists of the quick-action throttle. They snap shut like Madame Guillotine.

Press a discreet button and a tiny lithium ion battery girds its loins to turn over the 1157cc inline-four. When it ignites, birds fall from the trees. The exhaust, as stunning as any I’ve seen on a motorcycle, was made to the owner’s specification by Racefit of Darley Dale, Derbyshire. It’s tailpipe angle is too steep for my tastes, but it is worshipped as a symbol of fertility on an island in the Indian Ocean. And its sounds is like an echo of Krakatoa.

I swing a leg over the low seat, put a foot on a high peg and click into gear. I love these engines, I always thought they had the best gearboxes in the business too. Some see inline-fours as the soulless heart of UJM – Universal Japanese Motorcycle, but to me they’re the lead instrument in the orchestra that plays every summer Sunday’s concerto, The Bypass Howl.

Though this is from a Suzuki GSF1200 Bandit, it’s really an oil-cooled GSX-R1100 motor, and they were the engines that democratised real speed, 160mph speed, for the working man. They have a sumo’s flab roll of torque from tickover and things keep happening till 11,000rpm. I change at 6K, in the middle of the torque curve, short-shifting, clutchless, moving my wrist just five degrees, back and forth. A hundred comes in a blink. Everything is composed. The sound of the exhaust is left behind.

The first thing that is apparent about this labour of love, this hyper-exclusive collection of parts, the cherry-picked finest components from around the world, is how much it feels like a standard bike. This, bizarrely, is just about the highest compliment I could lay on it. It is an exotic special, but no one really wants to ride an exotic special. They’re a ball-ache. They over-fuel, they’re too high-geared, they have no low down go and barely any steering lock. This thing is civilised. Not boring, but neither is it memorable for the wrong reasons. It is a brutal, if somewhat dated, inline four with a power-to-weight ratio supercars can only dream of.

‘As long as it handles as well as a standard Bandit,’ was the modest aspiration of the owner, but he’s been in the special-building game long enough to know how difficult that is for a bike created from nothing but thin air. When it comes to riding unfamiliar bikes fast I’m more Frank Spencer than Freddie, but I know when a bike feels right, well put together, set up to ride, not sit on a show stand and pout. This bike made more of an impression on me than any other because on paper it was so extreme, but on the road had real civility. Then the owner jumped on it, stuck it on its back wheel, toed the gear lever, and wheelied up to fourth gear then allowed the front wheel to drop with a screech and a puff of grey smoke. Yes, it’ll do that too.