After inventing the V-twin cafe racer more than fifty years ago, Swiss performance guru Fritz Egli, today 84, ran the gamut of two-wheeled excess, with a series of bikes he and his team constructed to the highest engineering standards in the converted hilltop lumber store south of Zurich which comprises the Egli factory, powered by a variety of engines ranging in complexity from one to six cylinders. The 3,000 or so handbuilt motorcycles Egli created from 1968 up until his 2012 retirement, when he handed his business over to the Frei family who run it today, have included esoteric two-wheelers of every extreme. These range from the Vincent twins and singles which kicked off the café racer cult back in the 1960s, through the dozen or so TZ750 Yamahas Fritz built for F750 racing in the mid-'70s, and his Honda-engined racer on which Messieurs Godier and Genoud won the 1972 FIM Endurance Championship, before going on to emulate Egli's design excellence under their own names, to a range of four-cylinder hyperbikes powered by hotrod Japanese engines inflated way beyond their original capacity, and producing power considerably in excess of stock.
This story is from the June 2021 edition of Bike SA.
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This story is from the June 2021 edition of Bike SA.
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