NORTON ES2 RACER
Norton’s overhead cam singles are legendary TT racers, but Peter Lodge chose to develop the company’s plodding ES2 ohv roadster – and he’ll be shipping it from New Zealand again to compete in this year’s Manx GP
Words: Mark Graham Photography: Dave Kneen & Stephen Davison/Pacemaker Press, Lloyd Capon & Peter Lodge
Underdog status is not something Peter Lodge celebrates, not something that he revels in. “I’m just an engineer, more of a fitter really,” he says. “But we’ve got this ES2 to a stage where I wouldn’t want to swap it for aManx – I just wouldn’t.”
Of all the unlikely start points for a serial winning classic single-cylinder race machine, Norton’s pushrod ES2 might seem as left-field as they come. How could a massively undersquare (79 x 100mm bore and stroke) 490cc plodder producing a stock absolute best of 30bhp at 5500rpm become the scourge of pure-bred overhead cam racing singles?
The answers lie in an appreciation, and great affection, for the original product, a long and inventive development path – and the understanding that if a machine is inviting to push hard in a race, it will attract good riders and achieve results with those riders aboard.
Lodge is a 76-year-old Kiwi from Auckland’s North Harbour who began his riding on an 350 Ariel Red Hunter well before buying a Norton ES2 basket case. “I built it up as café racer for getting to work when I was an apprentice fitter,” he says. “It was a bloody good bike to ride. I had a Bonnie and all the usual stuff later, but early on all we could afford were the older machines.”
Soon enough, Peter began racing. “My first race was at Gisborne [in the east of the North Island], he says. “I took all the lights off, the bike went well, got placed in a couple of races, and then I turned it into a fully-fledged race bike. It was still on the standard cylinder dimensions, but I welded a new inlet tract onto the head for a big carb... and then all the other mods began in earnest.”
The New Zealand Clubman’s Class does not allow wholesale transformations of machinery. “You have to run most of the stuff the bike came from the factory with,” says Peter. “No big brakes or anything like that, but I fitted some cams, a high-comp piston – and with the long stroke it was still a very user-friendly motorcycle for someone who can’t really race a motorbike.” The Clubman’s ES2’s dominated the class for years.
In much the same way as top Grand Prix crew chief Jerry Burgess, who realised he was far better at building fast and reliable Suzuki RG500s than he was at riding them, Peter soon concentrated on further developing the ES2. “I put together a methanol bike for the Modified Class which was too fast for me, so I recruited younger riders and we won some Aussie Historic titles prior to the 2000s on the longstroke version” he says.
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