Hesketh
In the old laundry building at Easton Neston, the Northamptonshire estate that had been home to the Fermor-Hesketh family since the early eighteenth century, a small crew of engineers spent the tail end of the 1970s trying to build a motorcycle nobody had asked for. There was no established market gap crying out to be filled, no committee demanding it, just a peer of the realm who had already spent a fortune bankrolling a Formula 1 team, and who now wanted to build the sort of British motorcycle that hadn't really existed since Brough Superior and Vincent HRD went quiet decades earlier. That machine became the Hesketh V1000, and its story is one of the stranger detours in British motorcycling — equal parts ambition, undercapitalized engineering, and a stubborn refusal by the people involved to let the whole thing die.
Origins: from the pit lane to the workshop
Alexander, 3rd Lord Hesketh, was already a recognizable name in motorsport by the time motorcycles entered the picture. Hesketh Racing had made its mark in Formula 1 through the 1970s, run out of Easton Neston with James Hunt driving, and the team's single Grand Prix win — the 1975 Dutch Grand Prix — plus a string of podium finishes gave the Hesketh name real credibility in racing circles before it ever appeared on a motorcycle tank. The team's early history is generally given as 1972 for its formation in Formula 3, with its Formula 1 entry following in 1973 at Monaco. By 1976 Hesketh Racing had withdrawn from Formula 1 as a full constructor, though the engineering operation continued doing consultancy work for other teams.
It was out of that closure, and the engineering talent left sitting idle, that Hesketh Motorcycles was born. Lord Hesketh turned his attention to two wheels around 1980, wanting to build something with the character of the great British marques of an earlier generation — a big, hand-built, unapologetically expensive motorcycle rather than another mass-produced Japanese-style machine. The company took shape around Daventry and Easton Neston, drawing on people who had cut their teeth on the F1 program. Former Hesketh Racing engineers Frank Dernie and Nigel Stroud worked on the machine's layout, glassfiber specialist John Mockett handled the bodywork, and a young development engineer and test rider named Mick Broom — a name that would matter enormously to the marque's later survival — was based at Easton Neston working on the prototype.
The V1000: Britain's first superbike, built the hard way
The heart of the project was an engine commissioned specifically for Hesketh from Weslake — a 992cc, air-cooled 90-degree V-twin with four valves per cylinder and double overhead camshafts, a configuration that made it, by most tellings, the first British motorcycle engine of its kind. Development began in earnest in late 1977 under Lord Hesketh and his managing director and business partner Anthony "Bubbles" Horsley, and by the spring of 1980 a running prototype existed. On paper the V1000 was formidable: around 86 bhp and a top speed near 130 mph, wrapped in a frame and finish meant to justify a genuinely premium price tag.
What it was not, by most accounts, was ready. Production began in 1981 with talk of building as many as 2,000 machines a year — a wildly optimistic figure for a hand-assembled motorcycle from a company with no manufacturing history. The reality was a bike that reached customers before it was fully developed, mounting costs, and a motorcycle market in freefall globally. Hesketh Motorcycles went into receivership in August 1982, having built somewhere in the neighborhood of 139 machines, though at least one source puts the figure closer to 149. The company was liquidated the following year. It was not a clean ending — small investors lost most of their money, while Lord Hesketh was able to buy back much of the manufacturing rights cheaply at the liquidation sale, a maneuver that left a fair amount of resentment among those who'd backed the venture and led to murmurs, fair or not, of asset-stripping.
The Vampire and the fight to keep going
Rather than walk away, Lord Hesketh tried again. A new company, Hesleydon Ltd, was set up to build a revised version of the V1000 wearing a distinctive half-fairing and carrying the name Vampire. The exact year the Vampire program got underway is muddled in the record — some accounts point to 1982, others to 1983 — but the bike itself reached a small number of customers before Hesleydon also folded. Production totals are one of the genuine gray areas of Hesketh history: figures commonly cited run from 40 units up to roughly 50, and even specialist sources studying the model openly admit the precise number can't be pinned down. What's not in dispute is that the Vampire was a low-volume machine built under difficult financial conditions, and that its run ended by the mid-1980s with the second Hesketh company gone.
There was no golden era of mass appeal here in the way other marques might claim one. What Hesketh had, instead, was a small, fiercely loyal band of engineers and owners who refused to let the project disappear entirely — which is arguably the more interesting story.
Racing: the absence that says something
Given the Hesketh name's origins in Formula 1, it's fair to be direct about what the motorcycle side did not do: there is no documented record of Hesketh motorcycles competing at the Isle of Man TT, in national Superbike championships, or in any organized road-racing series. The V1000 and Vampire were road bikes, conceived and sold as luxury, high-performance machines in the tradition of Brough Superior rather than as competition tools. Whatever racing pedigree the Hesketh name carries belongs entirely to Lord Hesketh's Formula 1 team and to James Hunt, not to anything wearing two wheels.
Survival: Mick Broom and the long middle period
The most important person in keeping Hesketh alive through the 1980s and beyond wasn't Lord Hesketh himself but Mick Broom, the engineer who'd been there from the earliest prototype days at Easton Neston. Broom took on the marque's continuation, and from 1984 onward the business operated as Broom Engineering, based at Turweston Aerodrome on the Northamptonshire-Buckinghamshire border. The details of exactly how Broom came to control the operation — whether through a direct purchase of Hesleydon's assets or through simply establishing his own engineering firm to service and continue building the bikes — aren't entirely clear in the record, but what is clear is that for the better part of three decades, Broom Engineering was Hesketh. Broom serviced existing machines, built further examples to order, and worked on concept follow-ups including projects known as the Vulcan and the Vortan, keeping the flame lit for a customer base that had never been large to begin with.
That long stewardship wasn't without disaster. A significant burglary at Broom's premises cost him roughly £40,000 in spares, kits, and complete motorcycles, a blow that effectively ended his plans to put the Vulcan into any kind of production. Not long after, Broom retired from the business and sold the operation on.
A new owner, a new century
The buyer was Paul Sleeman, who took control of the Hesketh operation in 2010 and set about establishing new premises for the marque in Kingswood, Surrey, where the company remains based today. Under Sleeman, Hesketh moved from being primarily a support-and-restoration operation for old V1000s and Vampires into a maker of genuinely new machines again. The headline model of this era is the Hesketh 24, launched in 2014 and deliberately tied in name and styling to James Hunt's Grand Prix-winning "24" car from the Hesketh Racing F1 days. The 24 uses an American-built S&S air-cooled V-twin — reported displacement varies across sources, with figures given anywhere from around 1,917cc to 2,000cc — tuned by British specialists to produce output in the region of 120 to 125 horsepower, a genuinely potent figure for a hand-built retro-styled twin. Production was limited to a run of 24 examples, a nod to Hunt's race number rather than any manufacturing constraint.
Sleeman's Hesketh has continued to add to the range since, including a supercharged Valiant variant displacing around 2,100cc a few years after the 24's debut, and more recently a considerably smaller, Honda-engined 450cc model — a notable departure for a marque built entirely around big-inch V-twins, and one that suggests the current ownership is willing to experiment with what a Hesketh can be rather than simply replicating the V1000 formula forever.
Hesketh today
Hesketh Motorcycles survives as a small, specialist maker rather than anything resembling a volume manufacturer, which is more or less what it has always been. Based in Kingswood, Surrey, under Paul Sleeman, the company builds motorcycles in genuinely limited numbers for buyers who know exactly what they're getting: hand-finished machines with a direct line back to Lord Hesketh's original gamble at Easton Neston, and to an F1 team that briefly punched well above its weight in the mid-1970s. Original V1000s and Vampires, scarce to begin with and scarcer now after four decades of attrition, have become sought-after pieces of British motorcycling history, valued as much for the story behind them — the aristocrat's superbike, built too fast and sold too slow, saved twice by engineers who simply wouldn't let it go — as for anything on a spec sheet. It's a small marque with a complicated paper trail, but a real one, and it is, against fairly long odds, still building motorcycles.