IMO, Royal Enfield is not interested in making fast motorcycles.
They want to build moderately powered machines that get people from point A to point B on a classic looking machine.
In a country like India, where most of their sales are, most of the people ride 50-125cc motorcycles.
The traffic is shitty and the roads are even shittier so building a super-bike is not seen as a big priority by RE.
Besides. If RE did offer super heads, cams, rods and bearings for their singles and the new twin, Ace would be out of business. 
I understand that notion about RE not "wanting" to make fast motorcycles, but I don't find it believable. I believe it's a marketing cover story for inadequacy.
After spending the kind of time inside these bikes that I have over the years, it really becomes clear that what we have here is a company that spent 53 years assembling somebody else's design made on somebody else's tooling. The things they were compelled to add, such as the left shift and electric start were pathetic. Although, I will give them credit for getting that 5-speed box design from McGuigan. That was a good purchase, but it wasn't RE design.
AVL and others did the newer engines and chassis designs, and all RE did was try to make it as cheap as possible with very little regard for quality or reliability. They are an assembly factory, not an engineering firm.
So now, we come to the newest product, which admittedly has nice styling and the spec sheet has the buzzwords that the detractors have been deriding RE about for years. People have cynically asked about why no multi-cylinder, why no OHC, or why no 4-valves per cylinder, or why no 6-speed gearbox, short stroke, etc. The reason is that modern bike enthusiasts equate these things with power and speed, and all the other makers have them, so "what's wrong with RE, and why are they so behind?"
So, they put all that stuff in there with this new 650 twin, and ended up with 47hp at 7100 rpm, making practically no beneficial use from those designs, and ending up with what they could have made with a 535cc pushrod long stroke 2-valve single. It's like they thought that just having that stuff in there would cover the bases, but they didn't do anything with it. All of it didn't give any more result than the old technology of the old Bullet. It's basically just a bigger displacement engine.
Who needs short stroke, OHC, and 4-valve per cylinder for 7100 rpm? Those things are for high-revvers.
Who needs 6-speed gearbox for a wide powerband engine? That's for a peaky narrow power band performance engine.
It seems very apparent that these attributes were intended to "tick all the boxes" for marketing purposes.
Look, all I'm saying is the if they go to the extent of putting these things in the engine, it is silly to not use them, and instead produce power output that is associated with a much lower tech powerplant. It strikes me as "cosmetic design" for the purposes of marketing, but forgetting to make anything out of the parts that they put in there . They are making the heads and cams and ports and valves and all that anyway, so what's the big reason for not getting anything out of it? That they "don't want power"?
I'm just not buying that reason. My assessment from being up to my eyeballs in RE engines for more than 10 years, and seeing how they make things, is telling me that they actually do not know, and they don't want to pay for an outsource to design it.
I have read all the same articles that everyone else has read over the last few years, with Sid Lal's statements quoted in them. And those statements were always about how much more profit RE made than anyone else, and how they wanted to take over the middle displacement market. But I never saw one statement that he wanted to build the best motorcycle.
Topic: What would you like to see as accessories on the new twins? (Read 23133 times)