history
CR&S”, the acronym that stands for Cafe racers & Superbikes is a motorcycle company founded by Roberto Crepaldi in 1992. He opened a shop in Milan in order to make the bikes from the '60s-'70s known. In 1993, Crepaldi and John Britten had a collaboration and the first CR&S bike born.
John Britten was born on August 1950 and as a child he liked the engines, building go-karts. At the age of thirteen, he managed to show his talent restoring an Indian Scout motorcycle. After finishing school and traveling through Europe, Britten returned to New Zealand and went into business, designing glass lighting.
In 1985, John Britten designed the first bike, featuring a Ducati engine and he called it AERO-D-ZERO. On the track, in 1987, it reached a top speed of 234 kph. In 1988 and 1990, the bike won some speed trials due to those 242 kph and 247 kph respectively. At the age of 32, John had been working to a motorcycle design for almost two years and that was the reason why he set up th Britten Motorcycle Company in 1992.
The CR&S Britten V1000, as it was named, had a few successful runs in motorsports competition around the world, with Nangi Dones, Andrew Stroud, Stephen Briggs or Mark Farmer riding. In 1998, after some years when the CR&S got a lot of victories on the track, Crepaldi thought it was time for a Britten single cylinder project to be studied and manufactured.
After John Britten died, in 1995, the CR&S team stopped competing in racing and they developed a single-cylinder road bike with the help of Raceco. The bike was supposed to be manufactured and released for the motorcycle addicted. In 2004, Roberto Pattoni became partner and technical director in CR&S and in September of the same year the CR&S Vun was introduced.
2006 was full of events for the company. It brought two racing prototypes of the CR&S Vun, which had a real show at Ducati Speed Week, in Hungary. In the same year, a few units of this beast were delivered in Italy, USA and Germany. Seven more of the racing version were presented at the end of the year at Milan Show.
expand
