This is the original stunning photo used to publicise John Ewans' 1983 FF design, which John had made into postcards; he used them as a form of business card to advertise his design skills. Ewans built this machine in the early 1980s as a design study while he was a postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art. It's not just a mock-up - all the parts are there for it to be driven. For many years it was 'parked' forlornly in a corridor in the Imperial College Mechanical Engineering building but in the early 'noughties' it was given a richly deserved home at the Sammy Miller Museum on the edge of the New Forest at New Milton, in Hampshire, where it still resides (see the other photos in this folder, of the machine in the museum).
The underlying chassis has been run off-road and it uses a Difazio hub centre steering system and a Kawasaki GPZ1100 engine. It was designed to use hydraulically powered "skids" to hold the bike up while stationary and these are fully operational.
This is one of the most elegant FF designs ever created in glass and metal but would need a lot of work and pieces added before it could be used on the road. In particular, the shape of the windscreen would probably have to be made of plastic due to its shape which would then create problems with scratching from wipers although there are now some materials that might deal with this (as used by the Ecomobile and Monotracer, for example). In its basic form, the design showed an exceptionally low drag coefficient of 0.25 suggesting a potential top speed of over 180 mph. Pretty damn good for 1983. I sent this photo to Motorcycle News to illustrate the points I made in a letter to them about Honda's massively overstated claims that the then-new SuperBlackbird was the most aerodynamic motorcycle ever made. To their credit, MCN printed it alongside my letter.
In April 2017 this photo was chosen as the cover photo for the new FF group on Facebook set up by Barry Love and called the Feet-First Future Motorcycle Group.
PNB