48 AUTOCAR.CO.UK 7 AUGUST 2017
I
The Ariel company returned to its roots when it built the Ace. Matt Prior rides it
PHOTOGR A PHY OLGUN KOR DAL
MEET THE
ANCESTOR
ne e d t o le v e l w it h y ou:
I’m about as useful forreviewing motorcycles
as I am for reviewing
gas cookers. I use both
every now and again but am hardly
au fait with the latest technology.
Regardless, here’s me doing the
equivalent of telling you what I
think about a restaurant kitchen.
It’s a motorcycle called the Ace and
it ’s m a de b y A r ie l , w h ic h m a k e s t he
Atom 4 car I’m more familiar with,
and which you also see here.
The Atom relaunched the Ariel
name in 2000, after it had spent
a period of dormancy because it
went the way of so many British
automotive companies in the 1970s.
The Atom is now in its fourth
generation and it’s better, faster and
mor e c omp e l l i n g t h a n e v e r. It r u n s a2.0-litre Honda Civic Type R engine,
for which Ariel conservatively claims
a power output of 320bhp.
But while the Ariel made cars in
its early days, it was most famous
for two-wheelers. It produced
its first 149 years ago: the Ariel
Ordinary bicycle, ‘ordinaries’
being what penny farthings were
called to differentiate them from
the new-fangled chain-driven
geared bikes, known as ‘safety
bicycles’, because you didn’t have
to sit five feet off the ground.
DCT
This bike
is a manual, but
Honda offers a dual-
clutch auto ’box on the
VFR1200, and you
can have the samehere, too.
Motorcycles followed bicycles and
were Ariel’s mainstay in the mid-20th century, and while Somerset’s
modern iteration of Ariel doesn’t do
retro, a lot of its staff love motorbikes,
making the Ace a logical follow-up.
As logical as a small company
designing a motorbike can be,
anyway. For one, the engineerings pa c e on a bi k e i s i nc r e d i bl y
t i g ht. O n a c a r, c ompr om i si n g
a few centimetres of space is a
conversation; on a bike, a couple
of millimetres is a crisis. So the
technical challenge is huge.
Besides that, Ariel likes doing
things big manufacturers can’t or
aren’t interested in, and it’s easier
t o do t h at w it h c a r s t h a n it i s w it h
bikes. Bikes are a niche market
and all the big players already
de si g n t h i n gs t o b e f u n.
In the end Ariel settled
on making an exquisitely
Prior is on more
familiar ground
in the Atom 4