CADWELL Park reverberated to the sound of a rotary race bike earlier this year, as Guy Martin swung his leg over the Crighton CR700W race bike for the day.
This isn’t Guy’s first taste of the 130kg (dry), 220hp machine, having already completed some straight-line testing on the bike a while back. It is though, as far as we can tell, the first time he’s sampled the bike on a track - and the team picked one of the best in the UK. Cadwell Park is also Guy’s local track, meaning if he knew his way around any of the UK’s numerous venues, this is the one he probably knows the best.
While the rider's name will be familiar to most readers, the name on the bike might ring a bell to motorcycle racing fans of a certain age. That’s because Micheal Crighton was the man behind the Norton rotary race bike that competed in the late 1980s. The bikes were instant icons, helped in no small part by that oh-so-evocative JPS gold-on-black sponsorship. Crighton continued working on the rotary project long after Norton had officially mothballed the scheme. That work continues to this day, and what we can see being hammered around the stunning Cadwell Park circuit is the result of 10s of thousands of hours of work.
Watch Guy Martin rides the Crighton CR700W at Cadwell Park
While the video is something that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, what we sadly don’t see are any lap times for the bike around the track, although, with such low weight and high power output, it’s probably a fair bit quicker than your average trackday punter can go!
