Much ink, both physical and digital, has been spilled about the twisty, turny tale of the great British hope, Hesketh Motorcycles over the years. The 1970s and ‘80s were a wild time over in the island kingdom, where Britain’s previous homegrown motorcycle firm dominance was in a massive state of disarray. As Japan’s motorcycle industry grew in most ways that mattered (by numbers, reliability, and affordability for customers, to name some big ones), former Formula 1 team owner Lord Thomas Alexander Fermor-Hesketh decided that he couldn’t just let the British motorcycle industry go quietly into that good night.
In 1980, hewing to the grand tradition of British chassis building partnerships that sprang up pretty much since motorcycling existed Hesketh teamed up with an engine builder called Weslake to supply a brand-new, 1,000cc V-twin design for Hesketh’s use. Lord Hesketh was impatient, though—and the resulting Hesketh V1000 ended up reinforcing the already-existing bad perceptions of the state of British-made reliability at that time. As a result, Hesketh quickly went bankrupt
