INDIA RISING
UP FRONT
The sun never sets on the Enfield empire
MARK HOYER
It was quite a first editorial meeting in May of 1999, a room full of highly experienced Cycle World staff, and wondering what job I would end up with on my first issue. I had visions of a Honda RC-45 or Yamaha YZF-R7 test. Strangely, my debut riding assignment turned out to be the 1999 Royal Enfield Bullet 500 (“Bullet Slow,” September, 1999).
It was an interesting introduction to Royal Enfield. I’d had vague awareness of these British relics manufactured somewhere on the vast Indian subcontinent, and had only a little experience with actual vintage British bikes. The Bullet 500 of that time vibrated so much it made me itchy, was a highly inconsistent starter, and quite slow once it lit. It was also terribly charming and fun to ride. The cultural mash-up conclusion to that riding impression was “Vishnu save the Queen, the Enfield shall continue. Albeit slowly.”
In 2008, I flew to Chennai, India, to visit Royal Enfield’s headquarters for an exclusive ride on the all-new, fuel-injected, unit-construction Bullet 500. I saw, essentially, two factories. The dim, messy old one with ancient machine tools—and the new one where an automated high-tech CNC rig laid out a perfect bead of sealant on engine halves in a brightly lit, immaculately clean space. All was changing. The new bike ran great.
But it was still niche in America by virtue of being a 500cc single with made-in-India quirks.
Years later, I heard Royal Enfield had hired Simon Warburton away from Triumph Motorcycles. Before becoming head of product planning at Triumph, one of his big engineering projects was the Daytona 675cc triple. It’s one of the great street engines, and product during his leadership role from 2006-2014 was ever improving.
Since 2015, Warburton has run RE’s product planning in England, and the excellent normalcy of the 650cc twins is no doubt a result of his work. He’d be the first to credit the team, and I’d hope the team would credit him right back.
Royal Enfield parent company Eicher Motors Ltd. has been run by Siddhartha Lai who, around the time I rode my first Bullet in 1999, was put in charge of a then-struggling Enfield. His success in building RE helped him to eventually run the Eicher empire. RE recently said it was expanding production capacity to 950,000 units a year (in a 20 million unit annual market!) to help meet demand. In 2018, sales topped 850,000 bikes, mostly in India. But with models such as the new 650 twin line and Himalayan light-adventure bike, the U.S. market will surely increase its contribution.
