Horex

Origins in a Canning Jar Fortune

The Horex story starts with glass jars, not gasoline. In Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, Friedrich Kleemann worked as financial manager at Rex Konservenglas Gesellschaft, a company that made preservative jars sold across Germany. In 1920 Kleemann bought Columbus Motorenbau AG, a small motor works in nearby Oberursel, and it was his son, Fritz Kleemann, who turned that acquisition into a motorcycle maker. Fritz built the first machines using GNOM engines supplied from the Columbus factory his father controlled. The name Horex itself is a compound of convenience and pride: Homburg, the family's home town, fused with Rex, the trademark of the glassworks that had funded the whole venture. It is a strange origin for a marque that would go on to build some of the more sophisticated overhead-cam engines in prewar Germany, but Horex was always, at heart, a family business built on capital earned somewhere else entirely.

In 1925 Horex and Columbus merged outright, simplifying what had been a slightly awkward arrangement of a motorcycle brand dependent on a separately owned engine supplier. Friedrich Kleemann's majority stake in Columbus made the union logical, and by the 1930s Horex had brought engine production fully in-house, giving the company control over both design and manufacture in a way few German rivals of comparable size could match.

The Early Machines

Through the second half of the 1920s and into the 1930s, Horex built a reputation for spirited single-cylinder motorcycles, with engines ranging from a modest 198cc up to 600cc. These were not exotic machines, but they were well-built, and they sold. As the 1930s progressed, Horex pushed further into technically ambitious territory, developing overhead-cam parallel twins alongside its sidevalve and overhead-valve singles. The most striking of these was a 980cc twin built specifically for sidecar racing, a genuinely large-displacement engine at a time when most German manufacturers were still preoccupied with small-capacity commuting machines.

This engineering appetite extended to the S6 twin, a parallel-twin model developed with an overhead camshaft that represented some of the more advanced thinking to come out of the Oberursel works before the war intervened. Horex is also sometimes credited with a companion S8 model, though details of its displacement and configuration are too thin and inconsistent in the record to state with confidence. Whatever the full lineup, the direction is clear enough: Horex was a company willing to chase performance and mechanical sophistication rather than simply churn out cheap runabouts, and that appetite would define its postwar golden period.

The Golden Era

When motorcycle production resumed after the Second World War, Horex found itself in an unusual position of advantage. It became the first German manufacturer granted permission by the occupying authorities to build a motorcycle displacing more than 250cc, at a moment when most of the domestic industry was restricted to smaller machines. That head start mattered enormously.

The company's answer was the Regina, a single-cylinder machine that traced its roots to work on the earlier SB 35 design in 1948, though by most accounts the Regina itself did not reach the market until 1950. Sources differ on the exact date it first appeared, but there is no disagreement about what happened next: it became the best-selling motorcycle in its class in Germany, produced in 250cc, 350cc, and 400cc forms from 1949 to 1956, and fitted with features that felt genuinely considered for the era, including air-cooled brakes and a front suspension setup that was well ahead of much of the domestic competition. In 1953, Horex's peak year, the company sold 18,600 units of the Regina alone.

Alongside the Regina sat the Imperator, a larger overhead-cam twin that pushed Horex's engineering credentials further. Sources disagree on the exact displacement and naming of the early Imperator variants — some accounts describe a 1952 Type Q1M, others a 1954 Type 7 closer to 400cc — but the range represented the top of the Horex lineup, built around a shaft-driven overhead camshaft arrangement between the cylinders that Horex had patented. That layout would go on to be copied, in one form or another, by other manufacturers long after Horex itself had stopped building motorcycles — a rare case of a smaller German marque setting a template rather than following one.

The good years did not last. By 1956, Horex production had collapsed to just 2,790 machines, roughly fifteen percent of the 1953 peak. The postwar motorcycle boom that had carried Regina sales to such heights was fading fast as German buyers began moving toward cars, and Horex's management made the decision to stop building complete motorcycles, shifting instead to supplying components for Daimler-Benz.

Racing

Horex's competition instincts trace back to the 1930s, when its overhead-cam parallel twins, including supercharged versions, were developed specifically to compete in German road races and sidecar events. That effort paid off with a national sidecar championship in 1935, evidence that the company's engineering ambition was matched by genuine results on track, not just on paper.

After the war, Horex-powered racers continued to appear in German competition, built around overhead-cam engines in 248cc, 348cc, and 498cc configurations, with the 350cc variant proving especially competitive against the domestic field. These machines earned a reputation among clubmen and government users alike for toughness and low maintenance demands, qualities that made them practical rather than glamorous. Against the best of British racing, though, Horex's machines were consistently outclassed — Manx Nortons and AJS 7Rs simply had the edge in international competition, and Horex never quite closed that gap. The engineer Herman Reeb also designed an overhead-cam 497cc Imperator parallel-twin racer intended for international events, a further sign of how seriously Horex took its competition program even as the broader company's fortunes were beginning to turn.

Ownership, Collapse, and Revival

In 1960, Daimler-Benz formally took over the Horex works and dissolved them, closing the book on the original Bad Homburg company. For close to two decades the Horex name sat dormant, a piece of motorcycle history rather than an active brand.

It resurfaced in 1977, when Friedl Münch — already known for his own massive Münch Mammut machines — revived Horex Motorrad and produced an updated version of the Mammut under the Horex TI 1400 name. The venture didn't stick as a long-term operation, and the brand changed hands again in the 1980s, sold to Fritz Roth. From there it passed to Berlin's Bajaj-Motorfahrzeug-Vertriebsgesellschaft, which built Horex-badged motorcycles based on MZ and Jawa mechanicals for about eight years before ceasing operations in 1998. Each of these episodes kept the name alive without ever quite restoring the company to its prewar or Regina-era stature.

The most serious modern revival began when Clemens Neese and Frank Fischer secured the trademark rights to Horex starting in 2007, with formal possession of the name and logo settled by 2009. A newly formed Horex GmbH, based in Augsburg, took the name forward from there, unveiling the Horex VR6 at a press conference in June 2010 and announcing plans to put it into production. Deliveries slipped behind that early timeline, with production and first customer deliveries stretching into 2013 and 2014 rather than starting in 2012 as originally hoped. It was an ambitious project — a genuinely novel engine architecture attached to a small, independent manufacturer — and ambition of that kind is expensive. In August 2014, Neese filed for bankruptcy, and the brand's assets were taken over by 3C-Carbon Composite Company GmbH in January 2015. After a period of retrenchment, Horex relaunched in 2016 and again in 2018 with the VR6 Raw, shown at the Intermot trade show in Cologne, repositioning the company as a boutique builder rather than a mass producer.

Horex Today

The Horex name now operates out of Landsberg am Lech under 3C-Carbon Group AG, which has managed the brand since 2015. The current flagship, the VR6, is built around genuinely unusual engineering: it is the only motorcycle power plant to use a VR6 cylinder configuration, with a cylinder-head width of just 429 millimeters — narrow enough to rival a four-cylinder engine in packaging while delivering six-cylinder character. It is the kind of engineering swing that would have been recognizable to the Kleemanns, a small manufacturer betting on a distinctive mechanical solution rather than following the industry's conventional layouts.

The latest expression of that idea is the Raw 99, introduced in late 2022 and priced at €49,500, dressed in carbon fiber and fitted with Brembo brakes and Öhlins suspension. It is unmistakably a low-volume, high-cost proposition rather than an attempt to recreate Regina-era sales figures, and that seems to be the point: Horex today trades on exclusivity and mechanical distinctiveness rather than mass appeal.

Meanwhile, the original postwar machines have become genuinely difficult to value. Fully restored Regina examples are rare enough that appraisers have struggled to put confident figures on them, and any pricing claims circulating for these bikes should be treated with caution rather than taken as settled market fact. What is clear is that the Regina, along with the Imperator twins and the prewar OHC models, represents the period collectors and historians point to when they talk about Horex at its best — a German manufacturer that, for a few years in the early 1950s, built some of the most desirable motorcycles in its class before economics and a changing market pulled the rug out from under it. That the name survived at all, through Münch's revival, the Bajaj years, and Neese's ambitious VR6 project, owes less to corporate continuity than to a handful of people at different points in time who thought the Horex name was worth saving.