OLD BIKE AUSTRALASIA: 43VAN VEEN
Norton might have expected to benefit
from this with a spike in demand for its F1 Sport race
replica streetbike – but the indebted British company
was sliding towards insolvency, and production was
soon to shut down of the last Wankel-engined
motorcycle money could buy. Until now.
For it’s once again possible to purchase a street-
legal motorcycle powered by an engine of the kind
invented by German engineer Felix Wankel, whose
prototype such design, featuring an eccentric rotor
turning within a trochoidal chamber containing
peripheral intake and exhaust ports, first saw the
light of day in 1957, powering an NSU car. But not
from born-again Norton. Instead, the rotary-engined
motorcycle you can buy right now is built in the
Netherlands by OCR Motors, whose owner Andries
Wielinga is making the past live again. For in the
1970s, Dutch two-wheeled tycoon Hendrik ‘Henk’
Van Veen produced what was then by far the most
high-performance, as well as the most expensive➢