{"id":43778,"date":"2016-02-17T13:33:24","date_gmt":"2016-02-17T13:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.influx.co.uk\/?p=43778"},"modified":"2022-06-21T15:29:28","modified_gmt":"2022-06-21T14:29:28","slug":"mechanistic-brough-superior-ss100","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adrianflux.co.uk\/influx\/features\/mechanistic-brough-superior-ss100\/","title":{"rendered":"Brough Superior SS100"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brough Superior might be one of the most venerated bike brands in the history of motorcycling. But is the brand\u2019s reboot just another high-end custom house taking the mickey with the prices it charges for a build?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When the Brough Superior brand was first put up for sale in 2008 the custom motorbike scene was still under the radar. The mainstream manufacturers were a million miles away from giving a Wrenchmonkee\u2019s greasy rag for looking to small custom builders for inspiration.<\/p>\n

These days, the custom scene has noodled predictably from the underground to a point where its roots have reached and out all over the world into the mainstream of motorcycling.<\/p>\n

At the MCN London bike show, which was held at the Excel centre last weekend, every manufacturer was proudly showing their retro\/custom platform production bikes. Ducati has their cute \u2019Scrambler\u2019 flat tracker simulacrum. Triumph has a whole range of new and lovely Bonneville derivatives. BMW Motorrad has their brilliant looking and technically awesome R-Nine-T platform, which was the result of an R&D reach-out around the world to custom builders like El Solitario and Cherry\u2019s Company.<\/p>\n

But, shining like a chrome-clad beacon at the threshold of the \u2018custom and classic\u2019 side of the Excel hall was the immaculate and minimal Brough Superior stand and its prodigal new machine the SS100.<\/p>\n

\"BroughSuperiorSS100-Traditional-\"<\/a><\/figure>\n

The newest incarnation of Brough Superior is fundamentally different from a mainstream mass manufacturer looking to the creative edges of bike culture for their inspiration.<\/strong> The SS100 is a full on ground up manufacture. Like a custom house, it builds to order, but unlike your average garage build this comes with its own bespoke power unit – a 997CC V-Twin built by\u00a0\u00a0Akira Engineering; the same company that builds the factory Kawasaki engines for the World Superbike riders Tom Sykes and Jonathan Rea. By all accounts it\u2019s a stunning ride, which is what you\u2019d want from a machine that costs around the same as a BMW M3.<\/p>\n

\"brough-superior-ss-100-2015_03\"<\/a><\/figure>\n

At the heart of the appeal of a Brand like Brough Superior must be that century-old sort of mechanicity that provided so much of the upsurge in bespoke\u00a0bikers\u00a0these last\u00a0few years.<\/strong> It remains to be seen as to how low-down and dirty people with \u00a350K to spend on a bike will be – and whether it might\u00a0actually be folly to expect that the mechanical form of transcendence that can be gained by swinging a leg over a bike like this would differ, say from that you\u2019d get from a Superleggera Ducati Panigale, (which will cost you about the same).<\/p>\n

If you like the aesthetic of the Brough Superior, however, you probably dig the\u00a0provenance generally of a bike made famous as the fastest and costliest bike of the 1920s and 1930s – a bike ridden by TE Lawrence to his death,
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\nand a bike that evokes most completely the stripped-down\u00a0simplicity of pre-WW2 motorcycling.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\t\t