Meteoric arrival

While on the Royal Enfield Super Meteor's launch, as shown in last month's magazine, Alan Cathcart spent some time with a man who had a great deal to do with the model's development, Adrian Sellers

-  Alan Cathcart

The man with overall responsibility for creating Royal Enfield's first T twin-cylinder modern-era cruiser is New Jersey native Adrian Sellers, 42, who after a four-year stint with Honda R&D in Italy and, before that, nine years at Yamaha's Design Laboratory in Los Angeles, was appointed the Indian company's Head of Custom and Motorsport in 2016, based at its UK Technology Centre at Bruntingthorpe. Here he tells us how the groundbreaking new model for Royal Enfield came about.

"In my previous roles I ended up doing a lot of research into the custom scene, as part of keeping abreast of styling trends and so on. Custom has always been a very forward-thinking arena for motorcycles - such bikes are pieces of artwork that you can do one-off crazy stuff with that wasn't done before, which can then be brought into the mainstream. I became very interested in it as a function of research, and when I came to Royal Enfield, there was an opportunity to have a more direct participation in the segment. We began working on the Super Meteor pretty much as soon as I joined - it's an all-new platform for us, so yes, I guess you could say it's the bike I was hired to produce.

"When we created the 650 motor, we knew this was going to be a good basis for a lot of bikes, as with our Meteor 350 Single. And so even before I joined they had started to put together this multi-year, multi-model plan for the future, and that's what we're executing now every one of these new twin-cylinder Royal Enfield models that are coming out now are part of that plan that was thought up over seven years ago.