It has become a bit of a trend for guys who own high-end sports cars to have a motorcycle to match their collection. However, plenty of these people never ride the bike; they simply buy the most expensive Ducati Superbike money can buy and get it painted to match their car. That, of course, is a waste of a good motorcycle, but for a customer of Germany’s Motocrew, he not only wanted a bike that matched his customised Porsche 911, but he also wanted it to have the same stance and attitude. So Motocrew’s head honcho, Chris Scholtka, steered him towards a 2019 Triumph Bonneville Bobber. And with the help of some of Germany’s best brands, they built a slammed and stylised two-wheeled monster to serve as the Porsche’s angry little brother.
Chris is the perfect builder for this sort of bike; he knows how to work with a customer who has a very specific idea of what they desire and can then bring it to life. Being a firefighter by day, he is more than used to having the heat turned up and dealing with high demands from those who call upon him for help. The owner of the Triumph is a serious guy regarding his vehicles, owning a Mercedes S-Class, a tough-as-nails AMG GTR, a scalpel-like BMW M2, and the iconic Porsche 911. So, with all those homeland heroes, you might think a BMW bike would get the call-up.
However, Chris was convinced the Bobber was the way to go, and given what a ground scraper the Porsche is, the Triumph needed to be slammed to the tarmac. To achieve the desired result, the team at Germany’s Touratech was brought on board, and they put together a custom rear shock that is shorter in length and fully adjustable to get the ride and stance just right. For the front end, a few calculations were done, and with the rolling diameter change to come, it only required a small lowering of the forks and a tiny drop through the triple trees.
To take care of the new wheel package, Chris spoke to the team at Haan, a big name in motocross in Europe, capable of putting together any kind of package you care to dream up. For the Bobber, they chose to use 17-inch rims, and to lighten the load, they selected black Excel items: a 4.5-inch for the front, wrapped in a 120/70 Shinko tyre, and a 5-inch for the rear, fitted with a wide 180/55. This gives the Triumph a drag bike look, but the strict German road rules meant that Chris had to get the new setup professionally assessed and passed fit.
To further exaggerate the long and lean look, the traditional seat that comes from the factory was tossed aside, allowing Chris to showcase his fabrication skills. Rather than simply fit a slim-styled seat to the stock mount, he cut back the factory metal and began shaping an uber-neat subframe. The new bar work is cleverly hidden in a faux-hooped rear, which gives the back end a tough appearance that ends seriously short, before the swingarm mount. Over the top, a seat base was bent up, with some upswept support to stop the rider from falling off the back. And being built to go with a Porsche, it just had to be finished in Alcantara.
Now it was time to cover things in colour, and Chris contacted his friends from the HolyHall YouTube channel, who happen to build some of Europe’s best show cars. Even for this simple job by their standards, they went the extra mile, first adding a neat pop-up fuel filler cap into the factory tank. The hue itself had to match the finish of the 911, and the silver was laid down to perfection. To add a unique touch, a mix of gloss and matte clear coats was used on the top of the tank, which ghosts in the Motocrew logo. Neat black graphics finish things off, and the whole bike was then detailed within an inch of its life.
Next was the engine, and when performance cars are your passion, the stock power output of the 1200cc parallel twin probably will not suffice. To make the Brit more brutal, Chris fabricated a full custom exhaust system with some wild stainless tips and serious thermal management, thanks to the folks at Thermotech. The big changes, however, come from the Raisch Stage 5 performance kit, which was completed after the photoshoot. Part of the kit includes a new airbox that is fed by a pair of pod filters, but extracting the most power requires a full ECU remap based on extensive Raisch R&D and dyno time. The result is an extra 29 bhp and huge increases of up to 30 Nm of torque in key parts of the rev range, and Chris has the dyno sheet to prove the claims.
To tackle the lighting, Chris wanted to keep things as clean as possible, so he had the team at Motoism make a set of fork covers with a tiny set of turn signals integrated into them. The headlight is the latest LED piece from Koso, while the rear was made in-house, using a Yamaha light and a 3D-printed housing for a complete custom look.
Motogadget supplied the rear turn signals and mirrors and even sent out their first plug-and-play speedo kit for a Triumph Bobber. Word was clearly getting around the German custom community, and both the brilliant Bobber by Motocrew and its big brother, the Porsche 911, were chosen to star in the latest Ride John Doe advertising campaign. The smile on the client’s face? Priceless.
[ Motocrew ]