Ace 1200CR Street Special ridden - MOTOR GERR

It’s a café racer, the acceptable face of Harley Sportster ownership, a two-wheeled AC Cobra and an exclusive limited edition. It’s also a celebration of 75 years of Britain’s most famous transport café and expensive. This café racer is a lot of things to a lot of people, but crucially, it’s fun.

The Ace 1200CR Street Special was built by Krazy Horse in collaboration with Ace Café London’s Stonebridge Motor Company. It is the first of what both Krazy Horse boss, Paul Beamish, and Ace Café managing director, Mark Wilsmore, hope will be a limited run of V-twins – their idea of the ideal, modernised take on the original street racer.

The Harley Sportster-based café racer isn’t the rare beast it once was, even in the UK. While they’re not on every corner, a handful of bike builders have had the idea of creating a bike with low, drop bars and rearsets around the American air-cooled twin.

The main difference between this bike and others of the ilk, is the chassis – the 1200CR uses a Norton featherbed-style twin loop chassis that has been created specifically for the Sportster motor.

Ditching the low-slung Sportster chassis immediately marks this bike out as a true café racer. It has the stance; it’s lost weight, lots of it; it’s sharpened up; it’s everything the English originators of the breed were trying to do.

The big, single, S&S Super E carb, needs a bit of choke, and one prod of the starter button (above the key), brings the bike thundering into life. It’s when my hands reach to the long, chrome-plated clip-ons that my mind begins to throw up error messages.

There are four, shiny brass-coloured switches set into the clip-on tubes and there are no clues to what the four Jelly Tot-size push buttons do.

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