It’s a name you’ve probably never heard of, but the Van Veen was a Dutch rotary-engined masterpiece which was the James Dean of its day. Cool, edgy, admired by all and gone way before its time.
It’s that word
The rotary Wankel (giggle) engine came into the world first in the 1950s in the form a two rotor 1000cc high-power, very smooth motor, first used in the NSU Ro80. Sadly, that car’s production lasted the same length of time as the company, which wasn’t long.
The engines weren’t reliable and just as they started to go pop Audi snapped up the struggling corporate’s patents and decided to concentrate on a whole bunch of normal cars instead.
Other car makers invested heavily buying into the patents and produced their own modified versions of the engines. Mazda was the most successful producer with a reasonably reliable series, which it marketed over three decades, while Suzuki and Norton developed their own versions for their bikes with varied success.
The Dutchman
A little-known Dutch entrepreneur and bike importer, Henk Van Veen, snapped up a sack load of the NSU based engines being developed by Comotor in Luxembourg for use in a new Citroen GS, and set about designing a superbike all of his own.
The 996cc water-cooled twin rotor was sweet and with 107bhp on tap and buckets of low down torque the engine was a lightweight powerhouse that put Suzuki’s 500cc rotary efforts to shame.
There were no gimmicks like the Suzuki’s cylindrical rear light, cylindrical instruments, cylindrical tank and cylindrical air filter box – just a well designed sleek looking bike with alloy wheels, hydraulic disk brakes front and back and a gearbox provided by Mr Porsche.
Build and performance were excellent and everyone eagerly waited for its Dark green paint to appear in the showrooms.
But…
There’s always a but – and this was a big but… it was expensive. At $15000 it was actually twice the price of its 1000cc competitors. Ouch! Even a classy ad campaign stating its 0-60 time of 3.6 seconds couldn’t release the cash from punters accounts.
It was good, but hey, you could buy two top-spec regular bikes for that. Also, somewhere in the making the rest of the bike had gained a few pounds, tipping the scales at 700lbs, which was fine for a straight-line tourer, but the OCR was meant to be a corner scratching power bike, plus there was always that issue with rotary engines of their ability to drink like a fish. That’s too many buts on the but-meter for most people so, sadly, the readies didn’t flow in.
Comotor’s contract with Citroen went down the toilet when technical problems hit the French car maker’s new small car – they cancelled their order after only a few hundred were sold and Comotor was doomed, shutting its doors in 1980 to leave Van Veen motorless. Sadly only 38 left the factory to hit the showrooms, a crying shame for what was a pioneering bike.
Strange things happen
Like an unexpected encore, in 2011, two Dutch die-hard fans, Ger Van Rootselaar and Andries Wielinga kicked a new factory into life as a last salute to Henk Van Veen.
Ten further bikes have been lovingly constructed to an exceedingly high standard from components salvaged from the original factory. Collector’s items they would have to be as the new price… wait for it… was a cool $115,000 each, nearly eight times the original price.
But this time they were snapped up very quick.
CW