LIGHTNING STRIKES

Phil Irving was adamant: “V-twins: the only practical alternative to the single” he wrote as the heading of one of the popular columns he wrote in the 1970s.

Republished a few years later in his book Rich Mixture, Volume One, Irving laid out a theory which negated the decades of development and hundreds of thousands of British parallel twins manufactured and sold from the late 1930s.

“The only practical alternative to the single-cylinder engine was a twin made by bolting two similar cylinders in “V” formation onto a crankcase which was larger in diameter and little, if any, wider than the single-cylinder version as both conrods ran on a single crankpin,” he wrote.

“This was easily the most logical thing to do,