page_title: Mead & Tomkinson racing
section_title: "Nessie"
hierarchical_section_title: Mead & Tomkinson racing / "Nessie"
caption_attribution_description: English: Mead and Tomkinson Kawasaki Z1000-engined Endurance racer nicknamed 'Nessie' campaigned by Arthur Moloney and Roger Nicholls at a World Endurance Championship event at Donington Park in September 1981
context_page_description: Mead & Tomkinson was a motorcycle and car dealership in Hereford and Tewkesbury. Three of the Tomkinsons, sons Chris and Patrick, and their father, Mike, successfully built and fielded racing motorcycles. They concentrated on the Isle of Man TT and on 24-hour and 8-hour endurance races at Spa, Barcelona, Thruxton and the Le Mans Bol d'Or. One of their riders was Neil Tuxworth.
context_section_description: Mead & Tomkinson then came to fame in the mid-1970s with their specially designed endurance racer, nicknamed 'Nessie', (after the Loch Ness Monster because the bike was not a thing of beauty). The engines were conventional roadster engines, tuned for racing power. First they used a 1,000 cc Laverda Jota triple, and later a 1,000 cc Kawasaki four. Feeling that racing bike design was too conservative, the Tomkinsons gave Nessie a number of innovations:  
  Whereas motorcycles conventionally have the (light) exhaust pipes below the engine and the (heavy) fuel tank above, Nessie reversed this order to lower the centre of gravity. An inverted triangle in cross-section, the fuel tank was underslung beneath the engine.
  Whilst most bikes have telescopic forks, Nessie used an adapted version of Difazio hub-center steering, whereby braking forces were directed to the frame via a pivoted fork (rather than through the steering head).  This allowed neutral steering and an absence of brake dive.
  The rear suspension was a parallelogram arrangement, to provide stiffness without weight.  This device was not entirely successful, possibly because of having so many rose-joint linkages, and the team reverted to a conventional swingarm.
  The rear suspension pivot (like the Hesketh V1000) was co-axial with the drive sprocket to maintain constant chain tension.  This feature meant that (i) a smaller drive chain could be used and (ii) the chain was less stressed and therefore less likely to break.
  Nessie had its ignition circuitry in a removable, quickly-detachable 'cassette', so that if it proved faulty, it could be unplugged and replaced with ease.
  Thirty-five years later, some of these special features have been adopted by mainstream road and racing bikes, such as the ELF, but  Nessie remains unique in having them all on a single machine.
caption: 'Nessie', campaigned by Arthur Moloney and Roger Nicholls at a World Endurance Championship event at Donington Park in 1981, showing the enclosed belt-drive to the remote-mounted alternator relocated from the end of the crankshaft to the rear of the engine, as on their early Laverda racer[10]
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