Custom bikes come and go, but it’s not often you see a machine with an alleged £1,000,000 price tag! Enter the Ransom (ironic name) Archangel, a creation from New Jersey custom bike builder W. Robert Ransom.
Eye-catching it certainly is, with a host of interesting features and an overall look that kind of makes us feel like one person designed the front while another did the rear. One such strange feature, for a custom bike of this type anyway, is the move to slot a Japanese-made 1,000cc inline four-cylinder engine in the thing, when air-cooled big-capacity V-twins are usually relied upon.
That un-named engine (possibly a Suzuki but we are open to suggestions) does boast a claimed 185bhp and a 13,000rpm redline, and with a claimed 200kg to shift, the acceleration should be fairly sharp. Cornering might not be, though, with the raked-out forks (that seem to have zero travel) and ginormous 300-section rear Avon rear hoop making this look more like a boulevard cruiser than an apex-chasing hyperbike.
One feature we’ve not seen before is the headlight arrangement of the bike. To look at it, there doesn’t seem to be a headlight anywhere on the front end of the bike, although when the sun sets, the front mud-guard/beak/pedestrian spike slides down to reveal an LED headlight hidden within the front-end assembly. It seems to be tucked up inside the bike, and its location makes us think that the nighttime performance of the light is probably pretty shocking.
None of that really means much, though, as with a rumoured price tag nudging the £1,000,000 mark, it’ll be safe to say that most (if not all) of the bikes produced will be bought up by collectors who will trailer them to shows and events and plonk them on a plinth for people to gawp at.
