AJS 500 V4 Racer
Supercharged & Selfwilled
November/December 2006
By Alan Cathcart
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An overhead cam, water-cooled V4 may not seem too special now, but by the standards of 1939, AJS’ 500cc V4 was a technological tour de force. Throw in supercharging, and you had one of the most exotic motorcycle engines of its day.
Kyoichi Nakamura
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In a country so long wedded to single-cylinder supremacy, where the connotation “multi” for many decades denoted nothing more exceptional than a parallel twin, the idea of a Made in England four-cylinder Grand Prix racer always seemed at best unlikely if not downright impossible. It’d be a bit like Triumph or Norton making a two-stroke ...
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But just once, more than 60 years ago, a British manufacturer dared to invest in the exotic rather than the functional. And even if the result took a while to win a race (thanks to a scattered development path that was first interrupted by WWII, then terminated by the postwar ban on forced induction), it eventually led to the creation of the bike that won the first-ever 500cc World Championship, in 1949. That manufacturer was Associated Motor Cycles, and its AJS E90 Porcupine remains the only twin ever to have won the 500cc World title.
By comparison the supercharged 50-degree AJS V4, AJS’s prewar GP contender, was the first bike to lap a classic road course at over 100mph, in the hands of Walter Rusk in the 1939 Ulster GP, 15 days before the outbreak of WWII. The parallel twin ‘Porc’ was, if not exactly conventional, certainly much less exotic than its prewar predecessor. The fact that the only surviving examples of each bike have been brought together by someone who regularly puts them through their paces in public is very fortunate. But then Sammy Miller, their owner and past winner of a succession of International Six Days Trial enduro gold medals, is a fortunate man.
The story of the reconstruction of one of the crown jewels of his collection, the sole surviving AJS 500 V4 of the two made, is a typical Sammy Miller saga that has a personal link. “Walter Rusk’s mother lived half a mile from our family’s home in Belfast,” Sammy recalls, “so he was a local hero even if I was too young to see him race the V4, though I knew all about the bike and how fast it was. Like Walter, my elder brother was a pilot during the war, except he survived, in spite of writing off two Lancaster bombers after being shot up coming back from a sortie and crash landing, and Walter Rusk didn’t. Then, after the war, when I rode my pushbike to the Clady circuit and saw and heard the Porcupines in action, which more than anything else is what switched me on to bikes, I dreamed of one day being able to ride one myself. The idea I’d ever be able to track down the two of them was a dream come true.”
The key to realizing the dream was the late Jock West, the only rider to take the V4 to victory, in 1946. As AMC sales director, he not only obtained one of the title-winning E90 Porcupines, but also the supercharged V4 engine of the ex-Rusk bike he’d raced postwar, after which it had been removed from the chassis and put on display; the other bike was broken up. The original V4 frame was sold to GP privateer and dealer Arthur Wheeler. After making a deal with West in the mid-1970s to acquire both the complete Porc and the V4 engine, Miller tracked the frame to Alan Latham, who was using it for vintage grass racing with an AJS R10 500cc single.
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