Tech writer Simon Smythe's Hotta TT700

Tech writer and TT sage Simon gives us the grand tour of his pride and joy

- Simon Smythe

This Nineties carbon monocoque superbike probably seems like an odd choice of trusty steed, but this Hotta and I have been together for over a decade and a half. We’re growing old together, but clearly one of us is ageing a lot better than the other.

The Hotta is just as black, streamlined and lightweight as it was the day I first set eyes on it. If anything, the further the ‘monocoque era’ recedes into the past, the more strikingly futuristic it looks. I’m not aware of any pictures in the attic or deals with the devil.

If you’re not familiar with the Hotta story, in 1992 Simon Aske, a mechanical and production engineer who made lightweight carbon-fiber bodies for medium format cameras, designed a bike based on a hollow carbon chassis for himself from scratch. When he first saw the Lotus pursuit bike that Chris Boardman rode to Olympic gold, he thought Lotus had somehow copied him. Richard Prebble used a Hotta to win UK national time trial championships in 1993 and 1994; Hotta made a special bike for Graeme Obree for the 1996 Olympics (which he didn’t use in the end) and Chris Boardman rode a Hotta to Tour de France prologue victories in 1997 and 1998. Finally Jason Queally won Olympic gold at Sydney in 2000 in the kilo on the Hotta Perimeter, the last bike the company made before it went bust. I would love to have gone to the Hotta factory in Totnes, Devon to buy mine, but unfortunately, I was five years too late. Besides, in those impecunious days I wouldn’t have had £1,500, which was the price of the frame and fork - by today’s standards an almost laughably low figure for a specialist, pro-level, UK-made carbon bike.