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[[{“value”:”Think of the classic era of rally raid racing, in the 1980s and 1990s. What brands do you think of? Yamaha? Honda? BMW? KTM? Cagiva? You certainly don’t think of Royal Enfield, because at that point, they were only cranking out basic personal transportation machines in the Indian factory; forget about desert racing. But at the Goodwood Festival of Speed last month, Deathspray Customs unveiled a one-off tribute bike built in conjunction with Royal Enfield, mixing desert race styling with mechanical upgrades.
You can see a quick peek at the machine below, as posted to the Deathspray Customs Instagram page:
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Obviously, this motorcycle is based on the 650 parallel twin platform that Royal Enfield has been building for the better part of a decade, currently powering the INT650, Super Meteor and Continental GT with this engine. In this case, it was big-bored to 850cc.
The builders also beefed up the chassis to match the engine and the bike’s new desert racer look. Harris Performance built a new swingarm for the bike, and an exhaust. The forks are larger and presumably have valving to match the bike’s off-road role—they’re from Ohlins.
As for the bodywork, that was all built by Royal Enfield itself for this project. Sorry, if you want it, you can’t just order off a shelf.
You can see another view of the bike below:
But while you can’t just order the bike off the shelf, the project did show Royal Enfield is at least aware of the demand for desert race replicas. It seems unlikely to expect a machine like this to hit production, but if it did? It would be a whole new angle to the retro performance bike trend, which has seeped into the designs of both street and off-road motorcycles. So far, all the bikes built with this sort of design have been pricey Euro models. An affordable made-in-India rally raid rep would be a very different direction.
The post Royal Enfield Retro Rally Raid: Goodwood One-Off, Or Sign Of Things To Come? appeared first on Adventure Rider.”}]]
