MY FEEDLY

The Rare Norton MM 961 Flat Tracker – Just 5 Were Made

Just five examples of the Norton 961 MM Flat Track were built starting in 2017 by 72 Motorcycles in England. If the styling looks somewhat familiar it may be because a hearty dose of design inspiration was taken from the legendary Ron Wood “Big Tube” Norton flat trackers, a custom racer that won the AMA Ascot Park Half-Mile National event three years in a row in the early 1970s.

The Norton Commando 961 is a far more recent creation, it was developed when the company was in the hands of American ownership under Kenny Dreeer, with strong design links to the original Norton Commando of the ’60s and ’70s. When Norton was bought by British owners in 2006 and production returned to England the 961 formed the backbone of the company. The 961 is still in production now in updated form with Norton’s new owners TVS, and they’re rapidly spooling up to get the company into a position to challenge companies like Triumph and Ducati.

The Norton MM is far more than a mild custom motorcycle with a few bolt on parts and a paint job – this was a ground up reimagining of the platform and it includes a completely new frame design based somewhat on the architecture of the Ron Wood originals.

This new frame has a thick spine that double as the oil reservoir, with a twin down tube duplex and a box section swing arm in the rear. If you’re thinking that that all sounds like a job for a serious engineer you’d be right, 72 Motorcycles co-founder Jamie Ireson is a design engineer with years of experience working on everything from power stations to Formula 1 components – the first step in the build of the new Norton MM was comprehensive CAD design work for all new parts including the chassis.

Jamie and fellow co-founder Merry Michau, a celebrated motoring photographer, first struck upon the idea of building the Norton MM when visiting the Norton factory and chatting to the previous company CEO Stuart Garner. He loved the idea for the new bike and gave them a deal on a freshly built Norton Dominator, which would form the basis of the first prototype.

The air-cooled parallel-twin used in the 961 is an entirely new design with strong influence from the final 850 Commando twin from the 1970s. It has a capacity of 961cc, a compression ratio of 10.1:1, two push-rod actuated valves per cylinder and a total power output of 80 hp and 65 ft lbs of torque.

Above Image: The Norton MM features a combination of new and retro styling cues that have given the rare semi-production motorcycle strong appeal on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Norton MM benefits from the fitment of fully-adjustable Öhlins suspension front and back, with braking provided by two four-piston calipers on floating rotors up front and a single piston Brembo disc in the rear. A new fuel tank was hand formed from alloy for the MM and paired with a slim seat reminiscent of the seats used on the original Norton flat trackers.

The most eye-catching feature on the MM is doubtless that bold red and white paint scheme featuring the oversized “Norton” logo first used on the Ron Wood bikes – the theory being that a bigger logo would be easier for spectators to see as the bikes flew around the track. It had originally been planned that 12 examples of the Norton MM would be built, however just five would be finished before production ended – making them a rare, factory-approved special build with significant curb appeal.

In recent years there have been well-publicized problems at Norton that culminated in external administrators shutting the company down in 2020, eventually selling it to TVS. This period of turmoil had a significant negative impact on the values of modern Nortons as people were concerned about parts and servicing availability. These concerns appear to have been addressed directly by TVS and current Norton CEO John Russell. Production of the Norton model range is now underway once again and much to the relief of the Norton faithful, the company looks to be on the best financial footing it’s had since the 1960s with spare parts sales and motorcycle servicing back in full swing.

We only see these Norton MMs come up for sale extremely rarely now, in fact I can only recall one other example being sold and that was a few years ago. The 2017 Norton MM you see here has just appeared for sale on Collecting Cars, at the time of writing there are six days left on the live bidding, with the current high big sitting at £6,000.

If you’d like to read more about this unusual Norton or register to bid you can click here to visit the listing.

Images courtesy of Collecting Cars

The post The Rare Norton MM 961 Flat Tracker – Just 5 Were Made appeared first on Silodrome.

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The Lamborghini Countach-Powered Rambo Lambo – The First Super SUV

Of all the extraordinary vehicles in the Lamborghini back catalogue there are no production automobiles quite as extreme as the four-wheel drive Lamborghini LM002, better known now as the Rambo Lambo.

When it was first released at the 1986 Brussels Auto Show the LM002 caused jaws around the world to drop as people saw an entirely new automobile genre come to life right before their eyes – the super SUV.

Luxurious SUVs have been around since at least the 1960s of course, with 4x4s like the Jeep Wagoneer and Range Rover offering V8 powertrains, air-conditioning, and a slew of other luxurious amenities usually only found in higher-end road cars.

What Lamborghini did with the LM002 was take a gamble that there was a small but affluent global market for a luxurious SUV powered by a Countach V12, weighing in at almost 3 tonnes and featuring a brutalist road presence that looked like it belonged in a dystopian sci-fi Hollywood blockbuster.

As it turns out, they were right. There was a market of well-heeled folk who thought that the LM002 looked like an ideal daily driver and as a result, Lamborghini sold hundreds of them to a vast array of people, from oil sheiks to Hollywood celebrities like Sylvester Stallone, pop stars like Tina Turner, and even Formula 1 driver Keke Rosberg.

The Countach-Powered LM002

Lamborghini engineers developed a tubular steel frame for the LM002, this was then fitted with a combination of aluminum alloy and fiberglass body panels. A modified version of the Lamborghini Countach V12 was fitted up front, and power could be sent to all four wheels or to the rear wheels only depending on terrain.

Above Image: The Countach V12 under the hood and no-nonsense styling attracted celebrity owners including Sylvester Stallone.

Although from the outside it looks like a relative to the American military Humvee, the inside is vastly different, with full leather upholstery, thick carpeting, air-conditioning, tinted electric windows, ample sound proofing, and there’s even a surround sound stereo.

It was only a matter of time before someone came up with a nickname for the new Lamborghini, it would be Brock Yates’ famous piece for Car and Driver magazine that would coin the new moniker, an excerpt of which is below:

“Meet the Mad Max machine. Meet the closest thing to a street-legal Tiger tank known to man. Meet the Lamborghini LM002. Meet the Rambo Lambo.” – Brock Yates, October 1987 issue of Car and Driver.

The performance specifications of the LM002 were almost unheard of for a four-wheel drive at the time, it could dispatch 0 to 60 mph in just 7.8 seconds onto a top speed of 118 mph or 190 km/h.

Due to the weight and the engine choice the fuel tank needed to be borderline oceanic in its proportions, the tank used in the production vehicle measured in at 290 litres or 76.6 US gallons and the vehicle achieved an average of 8 mpg.

The LM002 would be kept in production from 1986 until 1993, 328 would be produced in total and a small number were fitted with the prodigious 7.2 litre V12 developed by Lamborghini for off-shore powerboat racing.

Above Image: The luxurious interior boasts full leather upholstery, air-conditioning, a state-of-the-art stereo (for the era), and plush carpeting throughout.

When Lamborghini unveiled the Urus in 2018 there were many who reacted negatively to the new high-performance Lamborghini SUV, however very few of them realized it had been this same Italian automaker who had first created the genre all those decades ago.

The Lamborghini LM002 Shown Here

The Rambo Lambo you see here is one of the earlier production models from 1988, it’s a carburetor-engined version which always proves popular with collectors, and the engine was previously rebuilt at Lamborghini Lausanne in 1996.

Later work includes a 2009 engine overhaul and in 2012 the differential was serviced. The vehicle is now being offered for sale with a price guide of €225,000 to €275,000, which works out to approximately $274,000 to $335,000 USD.

If you’d like to read more about this unusual Lamborghini or register to bid you can click here to visit the listing on RM Sotheby’s. It’s due to roll across the auction block on the 15th of June in Milan.

The post The Lamborghini Countach-Powered Rambo Lambo – The First Super SUV appeared first on Silodrome.

from Silodrome https://silodrome.com/lamborghini-lm002-rambo-lambo/
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Alfa Romeo 2.5 V6 Engine Coffee Table By Custom Brothers

Each of these Alfa Romeo V6 engine coffee tables is made by the team at Custom Brothers from a damaged or non-running engine. This will help appease those who don’t believe that a running engine should be used to make furniture – particularly not the Alfa V6 which is sometimes referred to as “Alfa’s Violin” due to the beautiful sound it makes, particularly in motorsport trim.

This generation of Alfa V6 first started appearing on engineer’s drawing boards back in the late 1960s however a production version would appear in a car until 1979. The 1973 Oil Crisis had caused Alfa to pause its development however by the late 1970s it was clear that a new engine was needed to replace the aging Alfa DOHC inline-4.

The new V6 was developed by a team led by Giuseppe Busso, as a result it’s sometimes just called the “Busso V6” by Alfa Romeo enthusiasts. Initially the engine had a single overhead cam per bank with carburetors and two valves per cylinder, however this would eventually be upgraded to double overhead cams per bank with four valves per cylinder and electronic fuel injection.

The production run of the Alfa Violin would be a remarkable 26 years from 1979 until 2005, it almost stayed in production longer too as British engine development company Cosworth wanted to buy the tooling and create their own version – though Alfa ultimately decided against it.

Each of these Custom Brothers engine coffee tables gets a thorough cleaning and detailing before it’s affixed to a red steel base that utilizes the original engine mounts. A glass top is then fitted courtesy of four metal mounts and a set of six short slash cut header pipes are bolted into place.

The final table sits at 73 cm high by 85 cm wide and 75 cm deep, that works out to 28.7 inches, by 33.4 inches, by 29.5 inches. For any fan of Italian engineering there can be no better coffee table to have sitting in your living room or garage, just don’t kick your toe on it in the night.

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Bugatti Type 46 #46491 “Superprofilée” – A Bugatti That Almost Didn’t Get Built

In the days before the widespread production of unibody cars the world was largely dominated by cars that utilized body-on-chassis construction. As a result of this there were countless coachbuilders around the world who would build an automotive body to your specifications, then fit it over a power rolling chassis built by companies like Bugatti.

Now typically the time between the chassis being built and it having a body fitted to it would be a few weeks, maybe a few months, and the two would stay mated for the entirety of the car’s lifespan.

There are some unusual circumstances where there was a delay between the construction of the chassis and its body, sometimes a few years but in rarer cases many decades can pass – such was the case with the unusual Bugatti Type 46 shown here.

The story of this car is worthy of an hour long documentary, it tells the story of a Bugatti chassis that wasn’t initially bodied, instead finding itself passing through the hands of a series of collectors.

The Type 46 chassis that underpins this car was built at the Bugatti works in Molsheim however for reasons unknown it never had a body fitted. Bugatti built 468 examples of the Type 46 chassis over the course of the 1929 to 1933 production run, but in the years after World War II a number of unfinished chassis were still in the factory.

The ownership of four of these chassis was assigned to Roland Bugatti, son of Ettore Bugatti the company’s larger than life founder. Roland still had two of these chassis in his garage with their crated up engines in 1952, which is where they were discovered by Richard Baudens who promptly bought them and had them shipped to his garage in Paris.

Above Image: The stunning design of the Superprofilée body has been winning over new Bugatti fans since the 1930s.

One of these chassis/engine combinations was sold to an American enthusiast and the other remained in the possession of Baudens who planned to have it bodied and completed.

Sadly as often happens, life got in the way and the project was never completed – the chassis changed hands between a number of Bugatti enthusiasts over the years before ending up in the world famous workshops of Ashton Keynes Vintage Restorations in England.

It would be with Ashton Keynes Vintage Restorations under the watchful eye of Keith Bowley that this Type 46 chassis would have a body fitted for the first time. It wouldn’t be just any body either, but a meticulously hand-built body inspired by the Gangloff-bodied Type 50 coupé, otherwise known as the “Superprofilée.”

The Type 50 is widely recognized as one of the most beautiful Bugattis of the 1930s, with tis steeply raked windshield and elegant curves it was the more sporting version of the Type 46 sharing many parts with its sibling.

In fact the period Superprofilée body found in the Cité de l’Automobile, Collection Schlumpf in France is itself presently mounted on a Type 46 chassis much like the car you see here.

Once completed this Type 46 with its immaculate body finally finished the work that had been started by the men who built the chassis back in the early 1930s – almost 100 years ago.

This unusual Superprofilée Type 46 is now due to cross the auction block with RM Sotheby’s on the 15th of June with a price guide of €500,000 to €700,000 ($610,000 to $854,000 USD). If you’d like to read more about its remarkable story or register to bid you can click here to visit the listing.