This Is The Most Carbon Conscious Royal Enfield Continental GT 650 EVER

Homegrown custom built drag bike that’s good enough to race at the Bonneville Salt Flats

The sixth element. I think it’s safe to say that in the automotive world, carbon is more valuable than gold. Just a little bit of it can alter the dynamics of a vehicle. Lather up a drag bike with the coveted element and you’ve got a warhead on a diet. Bangalore-based Greasehouse Customs recently built a Royal Enfield Continental GT 650 that looks like those wind splitting aliens that race at the legendary Bonneville Salt Flats and it’s the meanest homegrown bike we have seen in recent times.

Racer, mentor, designer, tuner and outright speed demon, Anand Dharmaraj, owner of IndiMotard and Greasehouse, says the inspiration for the bike was simple. Royal Enfields in India have a sentimental value and with the arrival of the RE 650 twins, a new culture of speed has been stoked in the country. Hence the platform was a given, it had to be a RE 650 twin, with a Greasehouse touch, obviously. The objective was to keep the build simple, the import of performance parts to a minimum, and tune the bike to sprint like Usain Bolt on four cans of Red Bull.  

The build began by stripping everything down, weighing everything, even the smallest bits, and identifying only the necessary bits that need to go back up. Most stock parts were custom-built from aluminum to keep that weight down. Sections like the subframe, swingarm, yokes were all built from scratch. To take things up a notch, the fasteners are made of titanium and stainless steel.

With that done, the design would still have to wait till maximum performance was extracted. A stock RE 650 makes 47.6PS–they managedto extract an impressive 62.2PS at the rear wheel. Greasehouse pulled out all the stops by throwing high compression pistons and bigger injectors at the twin-cylinder engine. It even ported and flowed the heads. Race Dynamics stepped in with its piggyback ECU and FuelX Autotune kits. Next up were the air intake system and exhaust. Velocity stacks for the deep inhales and custom-made two-into-one exhaust for the exhales. As they were going that extreme with this build, a lighter, lithium-ion battery made sense, as did a quick-shifter and a Rekluse clutch.

As this was a drag bike, the formula for the suspension setup was simple: lower the forks and stiffen them. Swap the stock rear twin shocks for a pair of preload-adjustable YSS aftermarket units. Then came the unsprung mass. The wheels were downsized from the stock 18-inch to smaller 17-inch rims. The front features an aluminum hoop, brake rotor, and hub while the rear gets an Excel rim hooked up to a stock hub. The finishing touches were Michelin race slicks.

Now finally came the turn for the bodywork to take form. Anand and team handbuilt a dustbin fairing from carbon fibre that met form and function with equal dedication. Even the carbon fibre tank cover, tail and side covers are custom built. In fact, there is no fuel tank, there is a fuel cell tucked away under the carbon fibre tank cover that accommodates less than four litres of fuel.