In 1972, convinced they were the future, Norton obtained a licence from Wankel to develop rotary engines.
In the late 1960s, engineer David Garside and his team began exploring the Fitchel and Sachs single-rotor engine used in the DKW/Hercules model W2000 motorcycle.
Garside created a twin rotor engine and gained an impressive 85% more power. Norton decided that the best way to defend the company against the Japanese attack would be adopting this new and revolutionary technology.
Although various prototypes were developed, it wasn’t until 1984 that a production bike appeared - the 85hp Interpol II, made for the police in the UK.
The first civilian bike from Norton with a rotary engine was the limited edition Classic, which appeared in 1987. Only around 100 were made.
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and they did the F1, and the JPS racing bike, rapidly banned..
Rotary engines are something that is still around.
Mazda still use it.
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I had an RX7 Mazda for a while ….It was the thirstiest, most inefficient vehicle I’ve ever owned.
20/21 mpg and you had to add oil every other week as they used a permanent loss lubrication system to the rotor tips.
A fun car but wow those emissions ..!
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That being said I was in Le Mans in 1991 when the Mazda 787B won with the Quad rotor wankel. That engine scream was frightening.
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I’ve never really understood the excitement around the Wankel. Yes, it’s power-per-volume and power-per-weight figures can be pretty impressive, but the Achille’s heel, the insurmountable obstacle, is the terrible shape of the combustion chamber.
It has a very large surface-area-to-volume ratio, so significant heatloss, and the flame path is too long for a fast, efficient burn (though twin sparkplugs help). Plus, no squish, so limited turbulence and less quenching.
These issues (amongst others) are why the Wankel is less efficient than a piston engine can potentially be, and in most applications efficiency is important. Mazda have hung onto it because the Wankel is almost part of their signature, their USP, not unlike Ducati have hung on to desmodromic valves, for the same reason.
It remains a mystery to me why Norton and Suzuki both thought it was worth gambling a lot of R&D on an engine with that limitation in the combustion chamber shape. Maybe they thought they could engineer their way around it? Certainly neither company achieved the power advantage that a Wankel could deliver: 85 bhp for the Norton, 62 bhp for the Suzuki are fairly modest figures considering the amount of fuel they burned.
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Sounds like a Landrover I used to drive
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I once had a Series 1 Land Rover, c1952, into which someone had shoehorned a larger Rover engine (about 2.6 lires I think). It did 12 miles to the gallon and steered like a supermarket trolley. I didn’t keep it very long.
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