JUMBO JET

“ON RELEASE, IT'S THE MOST POWERFUL PRODUCTION MOTORCYCLE EVER”

FRIEDEL Münch was a former Luftwaffe aircraft mechanic who, in the early 1960s, began designing an inline four-cylinder motorcycle based on a pair of Horex Imperator vertical twins atop a common crankcase. He’d cut his engineering teeth during Germany’s austere post-WWII years in his father’s mechanical repair workshop near Frankfurt, where he showed a remarkable talent for improvisation and lateral thinking in keeping their customers’ cars and bikes on the road when spare parts were in short supply.

In early 1965, his old school friend Karl Bohn dropped by to show off his new car, an NSU Prinz 1000 TT powered by an air-cooled SOHC 1085cc inline four-cylinder engine. Münch had already built a rolling chassis similar to a Featherbed Norton to house his own engine project, and he soon worked out that with a few mods, the NSU engine would fit right in.

NSU was once one of the world’s largest motorcycle manufacturers, producing some 350,000 bikes in 1955 before they stopped making