The Speedway Commission

The Speedway Commission is the first motorcycle Purpose Built Moto built entirely from scratch: no donor bike, everything from the frame to the fork made in-house. The client has been a speedway fan for years and didn't want to race; he wanted to enjoy the style of the old speedway machines on the road every day. He brought a GM 500 speedway engine, a Mikuni round-slide carburettor and a TTi four-speed gearbox in Norton/AMC style to the workshop. Everything else was made on the Gold Coast. The inspiration came from the dirt-track and speedway bikes of the 1920s and 1930s, with a touch of Art Deco. The chromoly tube frame has the steep steering-head angle of a race bike, but a longer wheelbase for more stability on the road. Up front, the oversized speedway-format front wheel turns in a girder fork designed in-house that uses telescopic legs as its suspension; every part of it came off the workshop's own lathe and mill. Fuel tank, oil tank and rear fender were formed by hand from sheet metal, and the Messinger seat floats on reworked trailer leaf springs. A speedway engine is really built for race fuel and a few minutes at full throttle. For the road, compression was lowered to 11:1 so it runs on regular petrol, and it gained an external oil system: a Jawa oil pump, a Panhead-style filter and oil routed through the front frame tube. The paint in bone grey with cherry red, white and black pinstriping was laid down by Pop-Bang Classics.