Phil Irving

Irving, Phil

From 1926 to 1929 Phil Irving and Ken Granter ran a motorcycle workshop at 28 Doveton Street, Ballarat, Victoria. In 1929 Irving joined John Gill on his round-the-world trip on an HRD Noxal sidecar combination, replacing Walter Stephens who had been Gill's partner for the first half of the trip.

Irving is best known for his Vincent V-twin engines and Comet/Meteor singles, and is credited with the original concept for Velocette's "Noddy Bike", the LE.

"In his turn Irving had been injured by an incendiary bomb, which fell on the Velocette factory two years earlier in November 1940. During his convalescence at home in Claverton, Worcestershire, Eugene asked Irving to make a start on a new mass production motorcycle. It had to be quiet, free from vibration, easy to start - the list of criteria is well known. Once he had returned to work, Irving's ideas got no further than a series of sketches. Veloce's wartime commitments made sure that no new motorcycle design work could be undertaken during what were the darkest days of WWII. One of Irving's sketches survives in the Club archive. It shows an opposed water-cooled twin with the cylinders arranged at 150 degrees. Irving thought that canting the cylinders slightly upwards from the horizontal would give the new motorcycle more ground clearance." Extract from an archive of leveloclub.org.uk: L.E. Velocette Prototype.

Irving also designed the prototype Model 'O' Velocette, a 600cc shaft-drive twin derived from the supercharged 500cc "Roarer".

George Cohen writes: "Quite simply the best information on preparing old motorcycles is to be found in Phil Irving's "Tuning for Speed", which was taken from his slide rule articles."

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