The Irving Vincent 1300
(Page 2 of 5)
March/April 2008
By Alan Cathcart
Barry takes up the story. “I’d been to Europe in 1978, visited the Isle of Man TT, but then came back to finish off my apprenticeship as a machinist with John Brookfield, a top fabricator who’d worked with Irving on the F1 Repco-Brabham. I got to know Phil there, and when he designed a set of Formula 5000 heads for the V8 Leyland P76 motor, he asked me to machine them for him, which I felt was quite an honor.
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“Anyway, we made several sets for him, which proved to be very good, and he started expressing an interest in what I was doing with the Yamaha TZ750 sidecar outfit I’d built and was racing.
“One day he asked, ‘Do you think you could make some Vincent heads?’ I was still getting my head around this when he said, ‘No, never mind — they’d never sell, anyway’ and changed the subject. But that stayed in the back of my mind, even after he passed away in 1992.”
After a six-year sabbatical from motorcycles in the 1990s, they built themselves a 46-foot sailing yacht. “We did a good job in fitting it out, joined the yacht club, bought the right hats, and tried to acquire a taste for Sauvignon Blanc — but the chemistry just wasn’t right,” Barry says. “So, we sold the boat and went back to our grass roots in building bikes — and that’s when I remembered what Phil Irving had said to me about the Vincent heads. We sat down one evening and thought it over and realized we should build a new Vincent motor — three in all was the original idea, just for classic racing. We were doing this for ourselves, not the public.” That’s how it started, anyway.
The Vincent revived
Around this time, in 1999, Australian restorer Terry Prince’s attempt to revive the Vincent marque had crashed in flames, leaving the Horners with access to Prince’s heads and barrels, for which they intended to create three pairs of crankcases to build a 1,300cc engine, the top limit for classic racing sidecars Down Under. But when the Irving Vincent solo made its debut at Phillip Island in January 2003, it became the first of a crop of Irving Vincents entirely manufactured by K.H. Equipment.
“We decided to make complete bikes ourselves, with the engines based on the original design but stretched in capacity and re-engineered to correct all the original shortcomings,” says Ken. “We didn’t want to call them Vincents because of having to pay royalties to the Holder family, who own the Vincent name, if we did. So we decided instead to call them Irving Vincents, to underline Phil’s contribution to the marque, for which he never got due recognition. We got approval for doing that from his widow, Edith, before registering the name.”
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