10 / CYCLE WORLD
It was quite a fi rst editorial meeting
in May of 1999, a room full of highly
experienced Cycle World staff, and
wondering what job I would end up
with on my fi rst issue. I had visions
of a Honda RC-45 or Yamaha YZF-R
test. Strangely, my debut riding
assignment turned out to be the
1999 Royal Enfi eld Bullet 500 (“Bullet
Slow,” September, 1999).
It was an interesting introduc-
tion to Royal Enfi eld. I’d had vague
awareness of these British relics
manufactured somewhere on the
vast Indian subcontinent, and had
only a little experience with actual
vintage British bikes. The Bullet 500
of that time vibrated so much it
made me itchy, was a highly incon-
sistent starter, and quite slow once it
lit. It was also terribly charming and
fun to ride. The cultural mash-up
conclusion to that riding impression
was “Vishnu save the Queen, the
Enfi eld shall continue. Albeit slowly.”
In 2008, I fl ew to Chennai, India,
to visit Royal Enfi eld’s headquarters
for an exclusive ride on the all-new,
fuel-injected, unit-construction
Bullet 500. I saw, essentially, two
factories. The dim, messy old one
with ancient machine tools—and
the new one where an automated
high-tech CNC rig laid out a perfect
bead of sealant on engine halves in
a brightly lit, immaculately clean
space. All was changing. The new
bike ran great.
But it was still niche in America
by virtue of being a 500cc single
with made-in-India quirks.
Years later, I heard Royal Enfi eld
had hired Simon Warburton away
from Triumph Motorcycles. Before
becoming head of product planning
at Triumph, one of his big engineer-
ing projects was the Daytona 675cc
triple. It’s one of the great streetengines, and product during his
leadership role from 2006–2014 was
ever improving.
Since 2015, Warburton has run
RE’s product planning in England,
and the excellent normalcy of the
650cc twins is no doubt a result of his
work. He’d be the fi rst to credit the
team, and I’d hope the team would
credit him right back.
Royal Enfi eld parent company
Eicher Motors Ltd. has been run by
Siddhartha Lal who, around the time
I rode my fi rst Bullet in 1999, was
put in charge of a then-struggling
Enfi eld. His success in building RE
helped him to eventually run the
Eicher empire. RE recently said it
was expanding production capaci-
ty to 950,000 units a year (in a 20
million unit annual market!) to help
meet demand. In 2018, sales topped
850,000 bikes, mostly in India. But
with models such as the new 650
twin line and Himalayan light- adven-
ture bike, the U.S. market will surely
increase its contribution. QI
/ UP FRONT/
INDIA
RISING
The sun never sets on the Enfi eld empire
ByMARK HOYER