Norton’s 200 Horsepower Street Shark is the Aston Martin of Bikes

By Jerry Perez - August 18, 2016

England’s famed Norton motorcycle company is still pushing through with its V4 model it announced last year, before the company received a $5 million dollar injection from the government and private investors.

The 1200cc four-cylinder engine in a “V” layout looks like will be a heck of a bike, when considered some of the theory behind it, regarding what a bike should look and perform like. While the code-named V4 bike has been taunted to have at least 200 horsepower, it’s a very specific look and charm that Norton is going for.

One can really grasp what the head of design, Simon Skinner’s vision is on this quote of his on an interview with BikeSocial, “If you imagine your R1 is your Nissan GT-R and the bloke gets his brochure and turns to the back page to look at the spec list, the bloke who buys the Aston just sits there looking at the cover and thinks ‘fuck me, what a beautiful car.’ That’s where we need to be. But it needs to be an appropriate level of technology so we need ABS, we need traction control, but we don’t need five anti-wheelie settings. It’s not what we’re about. But it will be a premium motorcycle, there will probably be a couple of different versions.”