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    BEAST The 1996 Elf 500

    Jun 18, 2018 5 minutes
    Words: Alan Cathcart

    The heart of any motorcycle is its engine, but all the more so in the case of the Elf 500, whose wide-angle Swissauto V4 motor gave rise to the whole bike’s creation. Yet, while the engine appeared at a cursory glance to follow the conventional Made in Japan route, it was far from effectively being a clone of a Yamaha (as the Cagiva certainly had been) and neither was it a Honda copy, as the Paton was unjustly tagged – when in fact it was Honda that had copied Paton!

    The Elf V4 represented 500cc Grand Prix racing the European way, breaking new ground with technical innovation that worked – albeit by no means as radical as the series of hub-centre, Honda-powered Elf racers of the previous decade.

    For a start, the Elf

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