Norton, Inmotec, MotoGP

From Motomatters.com:

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Norton In Talks With Inmotec Over MotoGP Engine Supply
Submitted by David Emmett on Thu, 2010-11-18 19:58.
in InmotecMotoGP
The rule changes coming for the 2012 MotoGP season are generating a lot of interest from new manufacturers interested in entering the series. Current Moto2 chassis builders FTR, Kalex and Suter are all believed to be working on chassis for use in the so-called CRT bikes, machines based around production engines, while BMW and Aprilia are also rumored to be looking at entering the class once the capacity returns to 1000cc.

Shortly after the Brno round of MotoGP, news emerged that Stuart Garner, the man behind the resurrected Norton brand, had obtained two grid slots for the 2012 MotoGP championship. The company's plans, it was believed, revolved around taking the 1000cc four-cylinder engine which will form the basis of a high-performance sports bike to be introduced in either 2011 or 2012, and race it as part of a plan to promote Norton as a performance brand. The engines were to be built by Menard Competition Technologies, but rumors emanating from the UK's F1 corridor - an area of the central UK stretching from Aylesbury in the southwest to Leicester in the Midlands - suggest that Norton was having doubts about the rate at which engines could be produced at, and that Norton was exploring other options.

Those options, it appears, have led to the Spanish engineering firm Inmotec, the company behind the Inmotec MotoGP project. Inmotec has been building a V4 MotoGP bike for the past three years, but the project has been plagued by a chronic lack of funds. Norton, on the other hand, has sufficient funds to invest in a project, but lacks the engineering expertise required to build a high-performance 1000cc four-cylinder engine. A link-up between the two would provide Inmotec with the funds it requires to keep functioning, and Norton with the expertise to produce engines in the numbers required.

MotoMatters.com's attempts to elicit a response from Stuart Garner at Norton have so far not met with any success, but through our contacts with the Spanish magazine Motociclismo, we did manage to reach Inmotec. Inmotec Managing Director Oscar Gorria confirmed to our contacts at Motociclismo that Norton is in talks to buy the company. No further details were released, but this option could provide the engineering capacity Norton seeks.

It is unknown whether Norton's MotoGP effort will be based around Inmotec's current V4 engine. The Inmotec machine has had several planned public tests postponed, with appearances at both Barcelona and Valencia canceled. Reports from testing suggest that the engine has a chronic lack of reliability, with engines blowing up after just a few laps in private tests at the brand new Navarra motorsports facility. Those reliability problems are precisely the sort of problem that Inmotec will be hoping that Norton's funds could help to fix.

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Good, more bikes in MotoGP.

Good luck to them.

I would think World Superbike would be a better investment and showcase for a small company wanting to expand their horizons and product line. MotoGP is horribly expensive and the machines only have indirect and tenuous connection to products sold to the general public. Even a few years of semi-successful competition in WSBK could translate into engineering that could be applied directly to the product. The other issue is that there's only 5 or 6 riders capable of winning on ANY MotoGP machine, and hiring one of them would eat a large chunk of the budget. Is it just me, or does this smack of more pie-in-the-sky like the ill-fat4ed Nemesis?

slimslowslider said:

news emerged that Stuart Garner, the man behind the resurrected Norton brand, had obtained two grid slots for the 2012 MotoGP championship. The company's plans, it was believed, revolved around taking the 1000cc four-cylinder engine which will form the basis of a high-performance sports bike to be introduced in either 2011 or 2012...

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If things go according to plan, the first bike produced will be gridded about 2023.

Harley, who actually DOES make/produce motorcycles that you can buy, tried their hand at competition in WSB a few years back and had no success at all. These latest buyers of the Norton name should worry about actually producing machines at a competitive price before running their mouths about racing against folks who really DO know what they're doing. This is just the "vaporware" school of sales - make a lot of claims about what you are GOING to do, hoping folks will wait around/pay money in advance.

mike996 said:

Harley, who actually DOES make/produce motorcycles that you can buy, tried their hand at competition in WSB a few years back and had no success at all. These latest buyers of the Norton name should worry about actually producing machines at a competitive price before running their mouths about racing against folks who really DO know what they're doing. This is just the "vaporware" school of sales - make a lot of claims about what you are GOING to do, hoping folks will wait around/pay money in advance.

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Trying to race something totally unrelated to anything you sell is another dead-end street. The "not-invented-here" stigma of the VR1K kept it from ever being fully embraced by The Motor Company and its supporters. Garner would be better off dumping a 961 motor inrto a C&J frame and going flattracking unless they plan to market and sell a V-4 or even inline-4, in which case they're putting the cart before the horse since they don't even have a motor on paper as yet.