By our guest contributor Nicholas Biebuck
I thought you would appreciate these photos I took at Brands Hatch this weekend of my favourite motorcycle ever; a Tom Phillis 1961 TT replica Domiracer with Low Boy frame, 650SS head and 500 barrels.
Lighter than a Manx and the first push rod engine machine to lap the IoM TT at over 100 mph, but sadly development was stopped by the Norton works team after one season and all of the machines were sold off to Paul Dunstall before it had been given a chance to shine.
A lot of people misuse the phrase Domiracer, which annoys me greatly. In my eyes there really has to be a number of points that the specification must fulfils for the name and that is: a Low Boy frame and 500cc engine with 650SS head.
Most other bikes described as Domiracers are simply cafe racer'd Norton Dominators usually of much higher capacity than 500cc.
This example was racing in the Bonhams British Historic Grand Prix Championship, Landsdowne Series (www.lansdowneclassicseries.com), a highly regarded classic racing series in the UK which is very friendly and has some real characters competing making for very entertaining racing.
Nicholas.
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4 comments:
great mood shots. muust be in the uk!
Nice to see the pic's and glad you enjoyed the bike. We unfortunately had a bad weekend with two breakdowns spoiling the event.
We will continue next year (2011)
Regards
Graham Austen (Mechanic)
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Your preference that a Domiracer has to be 500cc and have a lowboy frame is not surprising as that is the most famous version of the Domiracer. It is in error though, because most of the bikes the Domiracer program, under Dough Hele produced, had either Wideline or Slimline roadster frames. It is documented that only one complete lowboy Domiracer was put together along with two extra frames, this was the Domiracer as it appeared in 1961 at the IOM. in 1962 at the IOM Norton supplied four Domiracer bikes with Wideline frames and the four-leading shoe brake, the 1961 bike had the two-leading shoe brake. The Domiracer bikes at the 1962 IOM race were either crashed(Rudi Thalhammer) or neglected by the riders they were offered to in favor of more traditional racing machinery. Also in 1962 Hele supplied three Domiracer bikes with slimline frames to the USA Norton distributor to race at Daytona and other races as they pleased. They had to have slimline roadster frames because they were required by the AMA, which was being very tough on the specifications of Norton racing bikes in that era. Also a 650cc Wideline racing bike was supplied to Derek MInter who used it on short circuits in Britain. So the total number of Domiracer bikes put together by Dough Hele was about nine or so, one lowboy, four wideline 500cc, one wideline 650cc, three slimline framed bikes. All of these bikes had special components inside the engine, bucket tappets, heavy-duty cranks and rods, racing magnetos and handed Amal GP carbs with long bodies. Some of these special engine parts were put into production racing Dominators that otherwise looked like standard road bikes from the outside. So those who are fan-boys for the lowboy Domiracer can not be criticized for their thinking as there is almost NO information out there on the entire Domiracer program, and there are no original, documented bikes to examine, all having been either parted out or crashed etc.. There is one of the slimline bikes in the USA intact with it's history, having been preserved by a former Norton employee for almost a half-century. Dunstall made Domiracer lowboy frame kits and bucket-tappet kits in the early 1960s and sold them, so there are many times the number of lowboy frames and bikes out there than the three Norton originally had, and it is anybody's guess if any of the original three are left anywhere, as Dunstall raced the original lowboy hard and swapped many parts in and out of it during the 1960s, more than one person claims to have the original lowboy bike, but I would not believe any of them know for sure. The fact is that the definition of a Domiracer is not a bike with a lowboy frame, but it is any of the nine or so Dominator engined road-race bikes put together by Dough Hele in 1961 and 1962 to race in Europe, the U.K. and the USA which all had in common specially developed engine parts that were NOT available to the public at ANY cost, they were pure works parts that were only ever used on the factory bikes in those two years. The engine parts are the common thread through all the bikes, and they were changed from year to year in specification and from bike to bike, as these were true works machines. Norton did have a plan to produce the lowboy bike for sale to racers in the USA, but the AMA put an end to that plan by outlawing the lowboy frame for competition there, and since the USA was the largest market for Norton bikes, they had no further use for the lowboy frame, and of course the entire Norton works and racing department was destroyed at the end of 1962 by AMC anyway. There you go.........
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