Royal Enfield’s Build. Train. Race. (BTR) Program is Back for 2024! 

“BTR was an interesting evolution. [Royal Enfield has] dabbled over the last 120-some-odd years in racing, but we’ve never really committed in the same way that factory race teams do.

We are, however, committed to surprising people whenever we can. 🙂

When our twins came out, we were thinking of things to do with them and ways of changing people’s minds about Royal Enfield because, in many ways, the twins were a paradigm shift for us. They opened markets like the Americas where a [large-capacity motor] is quite useful.

We were looking at fun things to do, I thought, “you know what? Bonneville’s a lot of fun.”

We’re not making these super-performance motors or anything, so it’s very hard for us to find a racing series to be part of in that sense (we eventually did with American Flag Track)… [and] in Bonneville, you’re not worried about competing incorrectly against anybody.

We thought, “let’s try this out. It’s a one-off, if it doesn’t work out, not a problem.”

We started building a bike in partnership with S&S/Harris Performance and built a special motor for it; we found a rider who just so happened to be a young woman – Kayla Rivas – and she knew what she was doing.

And so we got our records, and it was all super exciting for us. In Europe the next year, we went to the woman that ran the [Petrolettes] and asked if [they would] be interested in doing some custom builds with us and then maybe racing them at the Glemseck 101.

They said, sure, let’s do it. And so we did – four different teams from different countries around Europe.

Anyways, it was a lot of fun, and everybody survived, which was my big worry. As a company you have all these ideas, and you want to do all these things, but racing is dangerous. And while every single one of these people who participated in BTR knew exactly what they were doing… you still feel a little bit responsible because it’s your program.

After that, we called the US because we knew there was a strong racing scene here. At the same time, we were looking at what we could do from a pro-racing perspective. Those two things came together.

This was an area where twins were key, and we had a twin. We were already building a motor for this, so we were like “let’s see, let’s try something here.”

Flat track is very much about community, it’s about the people getting together and helping each other out, everybody knows everybody, grassroots, and it seemed like the perfect environment for us to try something like this out because we knew there would be love and support there.

So we gave that a try, and it worked really well! It’s so important that we break down those imaginary barriers of motorcycling being a male ego trip and just make it about the bikes.”

– Adrian Sellers, Head of Industrial Design Department, Custom & Motorsport, Royal Enfield