John Britten, 1950-1995
John Britten, 1950-1995
TDC
Kevin Cameron
JOHN BRITTEN HAS DIED OF CANCER IN New Zealand at the age of 45. Britten is best known for his V-1000 twin-cylinder racer, designed, as John liked to say, “from first principles.” Not only was this superb machine built by Britten and his small group of associates, but almost everything on it represented important innovation.
John financed this work by an equally remarkable career in architecture. Despite the energy and concentration this required of him, he remained thoroughly human and accessible, full of boyish enthusiasm. The attention his successes brought him simultaneously embarrassed and pleased him. He never retreated behind a barrier of professionalism.
Astonishingly, Britten began as a sculptor and maker of decorative glassware. Needing a proper place for his family to live, he converted a former military stables into an elegant and imaginative home-something from the pages of Architectural Digest. This achievement led to opportunities in real-estate planning, which in turn gave him the income to pursue motorcycle design. Disappointed with available racing equipment, he set out to design and build something better.
Britten brought his V-IOOO to Daytona in 1992. Any one of its innovations would have brought distinction to a designer or manufacturer-but all had come from one private individual. How did his ideas arise? Britten spoke of aesthetics as a major basis for design; the plan had to please his sense of rightness. Like other highly creative people, he appeared to leap directly to comprehensive solutions, without executing all the steps between.
Prolific engine designer Keith Duckworth once reportedly said, “The world divides into two categories of people. There are the bright and lazy, and the dull and diligent. I happen to be bright and diligent.” Although John would never have said these words, they apply to him. Work he did, pouring molten aluminum in his wife’s pottery shed, fixturing raw eastings, machining, assembling, testing. And reconsidering, as when he threw out classical aerodynamics and began again with what he could learn on a 20-mile piece of straight road with a bike and stopwatch. Or when he married two techniques, filament-winding and monocoque, to create his “skin-and-bones” carbon-fiber fabrication system. Many people work hard; Britten was capable of free thought at the same time.
Men with consuming interests are often away, too little at home. It can’t be easy to be married to a genius, someone whose admiring audience applauds his absence from home. I thought I could see this in his wife Kirsteen’s eyes, the year she came to Daytona. People were lined up for a scrap of his time (myself included), and it’s hard to be a family in public. But I knew that John was a whole man, and not a live-in-shop motorhead. In 1990, I saw him pick up and comfort the crying baby of rider Gary Goodfellow; lots of family men don’t pick up even their own babies, much less someone else’s.
John worked in intense periods of weeks, sleeping four or five hours of a night. “I actually get more done when I’m tired,” he said in 1991, “because then I’m not so apt to jump from one thing to another.” His speech jumped from subject to subject in the same fashion, a stream of consciousness. One sentence fragment referred to his ambition to build a man-powered, flapping-wing aircraft. Another revealed his strange uncle, a reclusive man with visions and intuitions. Then might come “ordinary” engineering matterswanting to “just surround the combustion chamber with spark plugs,” or details of F-l intake valves.
John’s successes took him by surprise, for he saw his own work as just sensible implementation of rational ideas. I recognized in our first conversation the real earnestness in his face as he described his aim of working from “first principles.” He did not take his flow of ideas for granted, but enjoyed it as a small child enjoys a newfound ability. In 1989, I watched him talking to another constructor. As they spoke, they pulled valves and connecting rods from pockets and boxes, to illustrate their ideas. About to describe to me, in 1993, his new method of developing intake ports synthetically, he leaned across the dinner table and said, his face bright with his usual self-conscious, boyish enthusiasm, “I’m really rather chuffed about it.”
Britten’s methods were as important as his designs. Unsupported by any manufacturer, he had no army of uniformed technicians to be his hundred hands. To do it all himself, with his small circle of associates, he had to streamline every process. This led to his carbon fabrication, the rapid bodywork method and to synthetic port development. A better method brought a quicker result-and he said he didn’t like to do things the same way twice.
Why wasn’t he backed by manufacturers? Rumors linked Bimota, HarlcyDavidson and others. Corporations have their own way of doing things. Who can resist comparing the performance of large manufacturers to what Britten achieved on his own? John’s kind of engineering made big money and lavish facilities look like a handicap.
Ideas weren’t enough. He felt ideas had little meaning unless they could be transformed into what he called “a useful product.” And that grew from his humanity, his sense that ability is responsibility. His work existed, not as something separate, but in constant reference to his family, his children, his crew and riders-and to all of us.
It’s hard to accept that this man, full of good qualities, energy and fresh thinking, can simply end. Our esteem for him as a man and as something more than a man does not end. Enduring also is his proof that, working from first principles, it’s possible to make a useful product.
John Britten also showed it could be wonderful fun.
