In fact, the particular ’52 Vincent Black Shadow that formed the core of the Black Falcon build was no stranger to radical transformations. It had already been extensively modified for drag racing, completely taken apart, and left as a basket case for over 25 years waiting for its Prince Charming to arrive. Enter Ian Barry, stage left. “It was a humbling experience working on this build, because this was a bike that was so over-engineered for its time. You would think that it’s design brief would be something long since abandoned at the bottom of some engineer’s dusty drawer 50 years ago. If you took a blueprint of it to someone from a sales department and showed them, they’d tell you they could never make money selling it, but the fact is they did make it, and did sell it, and that’s amazing.” There may be few folks alive who know that blueprint better than Ian Barry. He completely dissected not only the mechanics of the Black Shadow, but the reasoning behind why every design choice was made, and how he might choose to re-interpret them. Of course the engine was completely rebuilt, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Barry rolled up his sleeves and fabricated forks, brakes, frame, controls, you name it. He even made many of them tool-free quick-release, and swappable for additional parts that he crafted, all in the name of making the Black Falcon easy to convert back and forth into a salt flats racer! “I designed it to be able to be converted into a drag bike with all of the quick release tanks and quick release adjustments, so if you wanted to, you could take it out to El Mirage and give it a good run.” One thing that Ian felt was integral to the spirit of the Black Shadow was its pedigree as a record breaking racing bike. In fact he blessed it with a top speed facelift all the way up to what he estimates would be 140 mph, closer to the 150 mph mark of Rollie Free’s Black Lightning than the 125 mph stock figure typical of a Black Shadow in its day.

“Having access to modern machinery and parts allowed me to take things in a little bit different direction. At the end you look at it and go ‘Oh wow! That’s a Vincent motor.’, but then hopefully you also look at it and see that it’s a Falcon. So that sort of puts it in its own category. Is it a custom? Is it a vintage? What is it? I don’t even really know, that’s for everybody else to decide. You find that the best way to honor it is to do your own thing. You study all of the design decisions that were originally made, but then to honor the idea of building a motorcycle, you have to come up with your own ideas. That’s the challenge. Doing a nut and bolt restoration is difficult to do right. I have to do some of that, but then I also have to invent things out of thin air. Where do you stop with that? When it stops looking like the thing you started with. When it starts to go too far away and starts to become too modern, or just misses the mark, then you pull back. I wanted to honor two sides, one being what I know about Phil Irving, and his engineering and design, and the heritage of the Vincent. Two being that I also wanted to pay respect to the drag racing era back in the 50s. Then after that I just wanted to go my own way and make something that I’ve never seen before.” Mission accomplished. The Black Falcon is definitely a “knee dropper” of a bike. The kind that commands you to stay awhile, get down low, and enjoy the view for awhile. I’m pretty sure that Phil Irving and Rollie Free would agree.

Check out www.falconmotorcycles.com