1971 Norton 750 GENUINE Production Racer. 1 OF 119 ONLY
ENG. 20M138145151


ULTIMATE BRITISH TWIN.
The Commando Production Racer exists as probably the ultimate development of the motorcycle format the British were to stamp as their own after World War II. To be clear, this Production Racer is a box-stock, genuine factory-built device, and could well be considered the best British vertical twin for the following reasons:

1. Only Norton, of all the British bike manufacturers, attempted to come to grips with the inherent vibration of a big OHV vertical twin, and thus only Norton's Isolastic-framed Commando, designed by Bob Trigg and launched in 1968, can be said to have dragged the venerable vertical twin into the post-war world.

2. The Norton Production Racer was the fastest, best-handling and lightest Commando you could buy.

3. When Tony Murphy took a '72 Production Racer to Willow Springs, former Norton factory rep Brian Slark reports, he got the bike around in less than 1:40. Considering that the lap record at the time was around 1:36, the motorcycle had to be taken very seriously as a racing machine.

4. They were hand built by Peter Inchley's famous Long Shop race department team (home to a B-17 bomber wing of the Eighth Air Force during WWII).

5. To convert the street bike rolling-chassis that got delivered from the Andover factory to the Long Shop into a Production Racer, Inchley and development engineer factory racer Peter Williams used an old-school run-it-and-see development program, fine-tuning the original Wally Wyatt project racer of 1969 considerably.

6. The few bikes that emerged from the Long Shop (estimates vary from about 100 to fewer than 120) proved the worth of the machine, because in 1971, '72 and most of '73 they virtually owned the class in England and Europe. Only the arrival of the Kawasaki Z-l and Honda CB750K put them on their trailers...

Text (with minor edits) courtesy Webbs NZ

Norton Commando