Falcon Black Custom Concept Motorcycle : Special Feature

What do we say about Vincents? Those beautiful British bikes, made by people obsessed with speed and engineering, the fastest motorcycles of their time, and still amongst the most exclusive in the world. But what happens when one sees a 1952 Vincent Black Shadow – the bike widely regarded amongst the Top Ten best bikes ever made, and the fastest motorcycle in the world for over a quarter century - lying around in pieces for 25 years? Well if that ‘one’ happens to be amongst most of us, the heaps of iron would be probably be dismissed as junk. For the more well-read, it would mean an epic motorcycle that once ruled the streets, but is beyond any use apart from nostalgia now. But if it happened to be someone like Ian Barry, well, it’s a different story. One worth writing a story about.

Some gen on Barry before we actually delve deeper into his masterpiece. Co-founder of the Los Angeles based chop shop Falcon Motorcycles, Barry’s obsession with motorcycles goes back a long time, when he began building custom choppers in his backyard. His style, which has now come to be the hallmark of Falcon Motorcycles itself, is creating stripped down versions of classic bikes, with a focus of functionality and speed. His creations, which look vastly different from the current crop of metres-long, chrome laden, stretched out custom choppers, focus on form following function. And while many designers use that as an excuse to create passable custom jobs, Barry’s style takes detailing to an obsessive level for the sake of both engineering and aesthetics, without losing track of the spirit of the motorcycle he started off with.

This line of thought has brought Falcon an enviable repute already. Its first motorcycle, the Bullet Falcon which was based on a 1950 Triumph Thunderbird, and drew widespread acclaim including the Custom Culture Award at the 2008 Legend of the Motorcycle International Concours d’Elegance. The bike kicked off Falcon’s Concept 10 series, which is Falcon’s long-running project to create 10 bikes around legendary British bike engines. Their second bike – the Kestrel Falcon based on a 1970 Triumph Bonneville engine – figured in American motorcycle magazine Cycle World’s 2010 list of the “World’s Coolest Bikes”. But even that could not prepare custom bike building aficionados for what possibly is the most authentic custom reinterpretation of the legend called the Vincent Black Shadow, which has manifested itself in the Falcon Black.

The Falcon Black may have the Black Shadow under its skin, but the first task was to get the engine up to Black Lightning specifications. The Black Lightning was a special, hopped-up version of the Shadow, and fastest motorcycle of its time – thanks to the high-spec parts which transformed the Black Shadow’s 55 bhp 50-degree V-twin to put out 70 bhp. But Barry wanted to go further – in came some Picador parts – the ultimate performance bits for Vincent engines back in their time. By the time almost every moving part in the engine was balanced to 0.1 grams, polished, made lighter and stronger, the blueprinted engine was making 75 bhp.

But this was the easy part, since the remainder of the Falcon Black was custom made, from scratch. The motorcycle’s frame, forks, brakes, tanks, handlebars, hand and foot controls, seat, and mudguards – all have been rethought, re-engineered and manufactured at Falcon’s LA workshop. The forks, still based on Vincent’s iconic ‘Girdraulics’, were fabricated from aluminum, their blades redesigned to create shorter and lighter parts. Then came days of work, hand shaping them to achieve that utterly gorgeous form. The shocks however are modern gas-charged units, to create better handling and ride quality than the way it was back in the 50s. The rear end was fabricated based on frame genius Phil Vincent’s triangulated design from 1928, but was manufactured in-house with a longer wheelbase for better stability. Brakes were designed to shout back to the ventilated drum design from the 50s, but engineered from scratch to provide twice as much braking force to stop the bike from its potential top speed of 225 km/h.

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It’s not just about re-engineering though, the largest part of the man-hours spent on the Black Falcon have been in the form of an obsessive amount of imaginative detailing involved in it. Phil Irving, the brain behind Vincent’s phenomenal machines, was taken in by the idea of being able to dismantle the critical parts of his bike without tools, and Barry has tried to reproduce the same idea in the Black Falcon. The handlebars have six-position adjustability for rider preference, and a single lever locks both the bars in place, without the need for tools. The front and rear wheels are also fully removable and adjustable without tools – and so is the drive chain tension, brake adjustment, and footrest position, just as it was with the original Vincent. Another sweet touch is the removable stock “roadster” tank, which can be replaced with a lighter and more streamlined “Quarter Miler” tank within 30 seconds, and without tools.

Falcon says remaining seven in the Concept 10 series will use engines from iconic British marques such as BSA, AJS, Brough Superior, Norton, Velocette, Ariel and Rudge. But what brings the Black Falcon on the edge of being a modern classic, and a piece of art, is how close it stays to the spirit of the original. Seldom has the custom motorcycle world created such an elaborate, thought-out yet honest homage to a true icon of the past, and a flag bearer of the spirit of performance motorcycling.