This bike is actually the first P55 (F1) to ever leave the factory in Shenstone on 1st April, 1990, weeks before the second was supplied to a customer.

Through an agreement with Philippe LeRoux we got it to race it in the German "Battle of the Twins" Series. Thus we used the F1 concept months before the factory could, the BoT being a prototype championship whilst the British championships, being production bike based, demanded a certain number of bikes produced to make the bike "production based".

It was entered in its first year with just the exhaust and the inlet tract plus the fairing differing from production standard. In the following years it aquired a different swinging arm and front forks, a different exhaust yet again, different carbs, high-comp rotors, aero engine twin-plug trochoids etc, etc.

All its active life it was raced by Hartmut Mueller (pictured above at its first race, Speyer 1990), a German racer of average abilities, which hindered the bike to realize its full potential. The other problem was constant shortage of cash. Sponsors were impossible to get, BoT racing being a class that was never on TV, and the whole exercise was financed through Norton Motors GmbH selling Norton and Triumph spares.

Racing is very similar to a drug addiction, and the first two seasons practically ruined Norton Motors GmbH with, in the end, the sales of the F1Sports ("TT" in Germany) models in 1992 saving Norton Motors GmbH from bankruptcy.

After its last season the bike was put into a corner, only ridden once by Joe Seifert in Poznan at a "Grab the Flag" meeting in the mid-1990s (above), and by Tim Seifert (left) at Salzburgring in 2009.

Its habit to throw flames when shutting it down into a corner gave it its nickname amongst the Seifert kids: "Nepomuk", Nepomuk being a little dragon in the famous German childrens puppet show "Jim Knopf" who to his great sorrow could not spit flames until Jim Knopf and his friend Lukas showed him how to do it.