Rara Avis: The Unique Lynton Racer

Colin Lyster isn’t a household name, unless you’re a hardcore café racer fan, in which case, he’s a demigod on par with Dave Degens and the Rickman brothers. A former Rhodesian road racer, Lyster moved to Britain in the early 1960s, and set about re-framing Triumphs and Hondas to reduce weight and improve chassis stiffness.  His frames were ultra-rigid and half as heavy as comparable Norton item; he typically discarded the lower frame rails, using the engine as a stressed member, and thinwall tubing of smaller diameter than considered prudent for a street machine.

Still, hotshot riders can’t resist a road racer with lights, and a few Lyster-framed roadsters can be found in books on the café racer craze.  Lyster’s frame output was low, but his impact on the industry was outsized.  He developed the first triple-hydraulic disc braking systems for motorcycle racing teams in the mid-1960s, using specially adapted Ceriani road race forks and his own fabricated swingarms, with his own cast iron discs.  Triple juice discs became a must-have item on winning road racers; Lyster began selling kits to the public in 1971.  After failing to interest the British motorcycle industry in his product, he sold his patents to AP Lockheed.  Ironically, it was Honda who first used hydraulic discs on production motorcycles, in 1968.  Still, it was Lyster’s patent, and he changed motorcycling forever.

By the mid-1960s, the British motorcycle industry had given up on Grand Prix racing, but enterprising builders hadn’t.  Colin Lyster thought a reasonably-priced, competitive engine could be built from automotive parts, and he cut a water-cooled 1000cc Hillman Imp 4-cylinder car motor in half, and built a DOHC, 8-valve cylinder head for it.  Interestingly, the Imp motor was designed by Leo Kuzmicki, the Polish ‘janitor’ who was ‘discovered’ by Joe Craig, race chief of Norton, as having been a research scientist in combustion theory before becoming a WW2 refugee.  It was Kuzmicki who kept the Norton Manx engine competitive a decade after its sell-by date, extracting ever more power from the aging single-cylinder design. After leaving Norton, he moved to the Rootes Group, and designed the extremely reliable and very fast Imp motor.

As reported in Cycle World in July 1968, Lyster’s Imp-engined ‘Lynton’ racer was a collaboration with Paul Brothers, and used an ultralight Lyster full-cradle frame, with his own triple disc setup. The cylinder head is a chunk, and the side-draft Weber DCOE carb doesn’t inspire confidence that the watercooled engine is light.  The builders claimed 60hp from the motor, which used a 180-degree crankshaft, a modified Hillman part, as were the rods.  Slipper pistons from Mahle and cams by Tom Somerton painted a picture of speed, and the projected price of £300 undercut a Matchless G50 single-cylinder SOHC motor by £75.  Orders were not forthcoming, though, as the project needed more development, and it remained yet another British ‘what if?’  It seems only the prototype motorcycle was built, although Lynton offered a full four-cylinder version of its special cylinder head to Imp rally drivers; a few of these are floating around, including rumors on one cut in half for a motorcycle!

Britain’s H&H Auctions turned up the sole Lynton racing motorcycle; it’s an uncompromised beast with a pur sang pedigree, and a lot of near-forgotten stories surrounding its build.  Colin Lyster moved to the USA in the early ‘70s, and worked with Canadian national champion road racer Ed Labelle to build Lyster-Labelle racers, using Triumph Bonneville motors in lowboy frames with triple discs. Only a few were built before Lyster moved on to New Zealand, where he carried on with other projects until his death in 2003.