The World of Autojumbles at your FIngertips

bike test - Seeley Suzuki

Seeley frames trans­formed the performance of these venerable racing engines and extended their racing life by another 10 years. But Seeley also made chassis for more than British power plants – and his Seeley Suzuki is considered by many to be the best bike he ever built.

Designed around young Barry Sheene who, in 1971, was just about to hit the big-time and had persuaded Suzuki to give him the engine from a crashed race bike. The race bike had come from the USA where the company were gaining race successes with a T500 Cobra based engine housed in a poor Manx Norton copy frame.

The nitty gritty

Handling was not good and Malcolm Uphill crashed heavily and the bike was on the scrap heap until Sheene’s persuasive manner got working. The young Londoner declared the Seeley Suzuki to be the best handling machine he ever rode.

So closely was the power-plant of the bike derived from Suzuki’s T500 Cobra that the first race engines even had the same automatic lubrication fitted.

At the time, the Seeley factory was in full production with 26 staff making everything from frames to complete race bikes.

Feature bike

With such a sophisticated organisation at his disposal work happened fast. Laying out the bike, Colin made the wheelbase slightly long for the day at 55½in. However, the length, and the conservative front forks trail, gave a very stable ride at high speed.

Sheene went on to win his first British 500 champion­ship and had many good rides in Grand Prix on the Seeley, results that had customers queuing up for bikes too. Not surprising as £350 bought a complete rolling chassis.

Suzuki specialist Eddie Crooks would sell you a brand-new Suzuki road engine for £250. Then it was as much, or little, tuning as you wanted to do to the motor and the bike was capable of running com­petitively in Grand Prix.

The bike pictured in this story was built for Frank Melling, from a replica frame kit, by Martin Crooks, Head Honcho of Crooks Suzuki, without whose help the job of develop­ing the bike would have been much harder and a lot less fun. The aim was to build not so much a replica of the GP bike but a machine which would suit Frank and would be com­petitive in twisty sprints and hill climbs.

The bike started life in Crooks’ workshop where the chassis was deemed ‘spot on’ straight out of the box. Martin found a brand-new pair of GT500 front forks and yokes in the Crooks-Suzuki loft and these were shortened and the damping tweaked, by Maxton Engineering. While he was in the loft Martin also found a brand new GT500 disc and caliper and, with modern EBC pads, the disc is well up to racing standards. A brand new Suzuki hub went on the back. The engine has a really interesting history with crank­cases from an American enthusiast who discovered that Frank was building the bike. They were unused but have a strange engine number: T500 10188. They supposedly arrived in California in 1967. Can anyone identify them or why they should be unused?

Rob Greenhill, at Cobra Racing, meticulously eased out the ports to match the Suzuki TR750 expansion chambers which Dave Swarbrick supplied. More for safety than anything else, a new Nova race gear cluster was fitted, losing the autolube facility and converting the engine to premix.

Martin headed upstairs again and came down with the last pair of sand-cast TR500 cylinder heads he had. Rob modified the squish band on these and they give extremely good com­bustion with no signs of detonation.

Dynos don’t lie

Frank adds “Because I was looking for a motor which would drive like a train uphill and on rough surfaces, we retained the original huge Suzuki flywheels. Over the years experiments on Motrac’s dyno gave interesting results and would, except for the data we have, not be easily accepted by tuners. First, the engine runs on 32mm carbs as neither 34mm nor 36mm give any significant power increase. Bigger carbs do allow the motor to rev more freely but only make marginally more outright power and the torque is pushed much higher up the rev range.”

The end result is a very interesting motor indeed. On the unforgiving, and coldly unflattering dyno, the engine gives a shade under 61bhp @ 8200rpm. This is some 15bhp less than the best Suzuki twins around and a solid 1500 less rpm. However, on the track the story is rather different. Corner to corner, the bike is a rocket ship and, despite being ridden by nothing more than a very ordinary clubman rider, many hill climbs and twisty sprint wins have come. Even more surprising claims Mr Melling, is he’s also won the occasional road race competing against riders who were definitely more talented on bikes which should be, theoretically, much faster. Quite simply, the Seeley gets on with the job of going from one corner to the next very quickly with no fuss.

The Seeley is very much a pure racing thoroughbred compared with race converted T500 road machines or even the factory produced TR500. There is no wasted space on the bike and, for a rider of Melling dimensions, it is a tight fit.

I ride the bike, and what mistakes I make, the Seeley never complains.

Just how good, compared to a G50 or Manx, is the Seeley? Franks says “Think tea-dance waltz against rock ‘n’ roll jive. In terms of a true classic race bike, the smile on my face every time I ride the bike shows what a joy it is. There are a lot more exotic racers about but nothing matches up to Colin Seeley’s genius and the bombproof tunability of Suzuki’s remark­able air-cooled twin.

Words: Alan Telford
Pics: Alan Telford, Mortons archive