The motorcycle you see here, named “RevElation” by the team that built it, is almost certainly the fastest Royal Enfield ever made – this will be proven one way or another in 2023 when the bike is shipped from Australia to the Bonneville Salt Flats for land speed record record runs.
RevElation started life as a stock Royal Enfield Continental GT, its highly-modified engine now has a displacement of 965cc and the bike itself can be changed from land speed configuration to drag racing configuration in just a few hours.
Fast Facts – The RevElation Royal Enfield Continental GT
- The Royal Enfield Continental GT was released in 2018, it was designed at the Royal Enfield Technology Centre in England and built in India.
- The combination of styling, engineering, the low price point saw the bike become one of the best selling large capacity motorcycles in a number of world markets.
- The Continental GT is powered by a 270º 648cc air and oil-cooled parallel twin with a single overhead cam, and four valves per cylinder producing 47 bhp in stock configuration. It has a 6-speed transmission, front and rear disc brakes with ABS, and telescopic forks up front with dual shock absorbers in the rear.
- The land speed and drag racing Royal Enfield you see here has a bespoke frame and exhaust, and an expansive list of modifications to make it the fastest and most powerful Continental GT in the world.
Revelry Racing
Revelry Racing was founded by Santina and Will Keith as the racing division of Revelry Cycles, a highly-regarded motorcycle dealership based in Sydney, Australia.
Above Video: This clip shows just how quick Santina is on RevElation.
Santina and Will both hail from the United States, but they’ve been living in Australia for 18 years after visiting on holiday and deciding to buy into a local Harley-Davidson dealership.
After selling their shares nine years ago they started an EagleRider franchise in Sydney, a company that rents Harley-Davidsons, and more recently they set up a Royal Enfield dealership which has now become the primary location for the motorcycle marque in the state of New South Wales.
Santina is a talented motorcycle racer, and she’s the designated pilot of the “RevElation” Enfield on both the drag strip and salt flats, with the rest of the team at Revelry Racing operating as her crew.
The Royal Enfield Continental GT
The Royal Enfield Continental GT was released in 2018. It was the first modern twin-cylinder motorcycle developed by the company and it was accompanied in the model line up by the Interceptor 650 which is a more cafe racer-styled bike that shares much the same engine, frame, suspension, wheels, brakes, and exhaust.
Amazingly, RevElation can be switched from drag racing configuration to land speed racing configuration in a matter of just a few hours.
The Continental GT is powered by a 648cc parallel twin with both air and oil-cooling, it has a single overhead cam operating four valves per cylinder, and a crank angle of 270º with a gear-driven balance shaft to reduce vibration.
This engine produces 47 bhp at 7,250 rpm with 52 Nm of torque at 5,250 rpm, it has a 6-speed transmission, and it can propel the bike to a claimed top speed of 165 km/h or just over 100 mph – the fabled cafe racer “ton.”
The architecture of the Continental GT follows classic motorcycle design, with a tubular steel frame, standard telescopic forks up front, and twin shock absorbers in the rear.
Since its release the Interceptor has become one of the best selling motorcycles in its class, and the best selling large capacity motorcycle in the UK market for a few years running. The success has largely come down to the combination of styling, classic engineering, and the affordable price.
The RevElation Royal Enfield Continental GT Shown Here
The motorcycle you see here was built in-house by the team at Revelry Racing, the project is being led by Will specifically to build the fastest Royal Enfield motorcycle in history – no mean feat given that Royal Enfield is the oldest motorcycle company in continuous production, having been founded back in 1901.
Above Image: Revelry Cycles has a popular YouTube Channel dedicated to teaching people about various aspects of motorcycle engineering and how to modify their own bikes.
In order to achieve this goal Will, Santina and their team at Revelry set about reengineering almost every part of the bike while still being careful to keep it a “true” Royal Enfield. A new tubular steel frame was developed from scratch by Will and built using Santina’s measurements to ensure it was perfectly sized for her.
The engine was disassembled and rebuilt with an S&S 865cc Big Bore kit, the displacement was then stroked out to 965cc thanks to the addition of a Revelry Racing stroker crankshaft and connecting rods.
A bespoke exhaust was fabricated by Revelry along with a 40mm throttle body, and a CNC milled big valve cylinder head. These parts are joined by an S&S ECU, a Daytona Twin-Tec wide band system, a Rekluse clutch, an RCi Fuel Cell, K&N air filters, Ipone oil, a Venhill featherlight clutch cable, and perhaps most importantly, a Nitro Express dry nitrous system.
As mentioned in the introduction, RevElation was specifically designed for both land speed racing and drag racing, it takes just a few hours to convert the bike from one specification to the other, with gearing, body work, tires, and wheelie bars making up the bulk of the changes.
The Continental GT engine started out at 648cc, this one now has a displacement of 965cc due to an S&S big bore kit and some custom stroking by the team at Revelry Cycles.
Santina is a graduate of the Motorcycle Mechanics Institute and she’s spent over 20 years in the industry, this makes her an ideal rider given her in-depth understanding of the engineering of the bike, and her ability to quickly diagnose issues and fix them.
Santina and RevElation are already making a name for themselves on drag strips in Sydney, and the Revelry Racing team will be shipping the bike to Utah for land speed trails on the Bonneville Salt Flats in 2023 to claim the title of the world’s fastest Royal Enfield once and for all.
Will and Santina have a popular YouTube channel that largely focusses on modifying Royal Enfield motorcycles, and they also post videos from their racing exploits there for those who are following the project.
If you’d like to visit Revelry Cycles you can visit the website here.
Follow Revelry Racing on YouTube – Instagram – Facebook
Images courtesy of Revelry Racing – Stephen Broholm 2022©
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
