Motorcycle Investor mag
Subscribe to our free email news
Hercules and the Commander
Rotary engine motorcycles
Guy 'Guido' Allen
June 5, 2026
The dream of rotary-engine motorcycles was fabulous – seamless and fast-building power from a light engine. While Mazda made it work in the car world, it was too big a commercial hill for motorcycle marques
We have been playing
around looking for a good rotary or Wankel engine
motorcycle to maybe add to the fleet. And so came
across a few gems and stories...here are a few
pointers.
DKW's Hercules W-2000 of
1974 was a
commercial pioneer and struggled.
Suzuki had more commercial and marketing muscle and still struggled despite offering extended warranties on rotor blades. That's the first-gen RE5 (1974) above and the second-gen at top
There have been am
surprising number of tilts at this idea over the
years, some of which never made it into production
(such as the Yamaha RZ201
concept from 1972 shown above) and all of which
have been a commercial sink-hole. We admire that.
The two I have ridden so
far are the
Norton Classic (1987 – above) and Commander
(1988 – below). The engines were smooth and pretty
sexy with their ability to build a seamless rush. And
they needed to be bigger, or tuned less
conservatively.
The Commander looked
suspiciously like a BMW K100LT and was developed in
the hope British police forces would get all patriotic
and buy local product. Some did, but not enough.
Of course the cool kids
bought the Norton F1
JPS race replica (1989) – if you had loads of cash.
For me the Henk van Veen-developed OCR 1000 gem out of the Netherlands (circa 1976) is the most stylish.
Our favoured online
overview of rotary
motorcycle history is here at The Vintagent.
***
-------------------------------------------------
Produced by AllMoto abn 61 400 694 722
Privacy: we do not collect cookies or any other data.
Top banner pic by the talented Stuart Grant!
Archives
Contact