Since we’re looking at interesting motorcycle designs these days, the Tul-aris is worth a look back. The Tul-aris was the work of Dr. Rob Tuluie, who designed and built this 2 stroke wonder about six or seven years ago. I remember when this popped up in the motorcycle press but it then faded away and I never saw much more about it.
The fine Doctor, a Ph.D that is, worked for MTS Systems Corporation at the time, a vehicle testing company with a lot of racing and motorcycle companies for clients. With the swirl of such things in mind and previous motorcycle work with Victory to his credit, along with having already designed and built a racing motorcycle, he got the idea of taking a 700cc Polaris 2 stroke twin from a snowmobile and building a high performance motorcycle around it. The result was the Tul-aris, a 140hp, 273 pound racer. That’s power to weight we can all appreciate!
He evidently had his sights on some WERA racing classes and talked of a 500cc version of the engine for GP racing but , of course 2 strokes went away, though at the time, I don’t know if that had anything to do with whether it raced or not and I don’t know if it ever actually raced anywhere, but, for a design outside the norm, it rates high marks for creative engineering and it certainly deserves attention for being a great looking motorcycle.
The most information I ran across were these old Roadracing World articles that have quite a few photos of the bike and it discusses the engineering behind it. If any of you have any more information about what became of it, drop us a line.
Chris says
Hmmm….drop that tail section a bit and give it a higher bar and you’d have a pretty killer sport standard, too. It’d need some work re-routing the exhaust so you could fit in a battery, unless you wanted to go super-old-school and have a carbuereted street bike with a kickstart and a wicked capacitor/alternator-based electrical system. There was a guy in the Chicago area who eliminated the battery from his Kawasaki GPz550 (at least I think that’s what it was) a couple years ago or so, and it looked pretty killer. Wouldn’t work with EFI, though, since you need a fuel pump to feed the injectors :-\
cl
doug says
A book that documents the early engineers as well as Tuluie, Britten, Burt Munro, and Czysz would sell.
Discovery, History Channel, or TLC could also get a lot of viewers for programming that covers the above.
A large sales volume of the dvd will follow, while Speed Channel would be covering NASCAR.
…hmmmm, Rossi vs. Alonso challenge. What about a race between the Tul-aris and the Britten? That’s en-ter-tain-ment.
C.J. Luke says
Way cool! I did some looking and found this link if you want more information.
http://venus.13x.com/roadracingworld/issues/apr00/tularis.htm
If we could just find someone that manufactured a clutch+transmission like that for reasonable dollars…that would enable a lot of do it yourselfers to go forward on ‘sport bike’ projects.
kneeslider says
CJ, that’s the first of the two links above …
C. J. Luke, III says
oops….I am so bad 🙁
todd says
An easy way to make up a close ratio tranny is to buy an old CR500 or other blown 2-stroke motor. Hacksaw off the crankcase and there you go. Of course there’s more to it than that but since a 2-stroke motor’s tranny has to be separately sealed from the crankcase and contain its own oil it’s a fine candidate.
-todd
james says
Actually both the britten and the tularis have both raced at daytona. The tularis was faster. It hold the lap record to this day for the fastest home-built machine and daytona is a reeally fast track.