This Colourful Modified Royal Enfield Continental GT 650 Is Built For Touring!

Sports touring isn’t a new genre of motorcycling but taking a retro-styled cafe-racer and converting it into a tourer definitely sounds cool. Meet the Royal Enfield Continental GT 650 Tourer made by Royal Enfield UK and Top Gear UK for the Savile Row Concours show in London. Now, the Conti GT, with its forward-biased riding stance, has a clear aversion to touring, but the folks behind this custom bike clearly saw what many of us didn’t. Talk about a bike you can take to the track and also tour the whole country on! 

Let’s first start with the styling. There’s a bespoke race fairing from Harris Performance (Royal Enfield’s performance team from the UK), and luggage mounts created by Fastec Racing and Malle London. The livery is inspired from a 1975 BMW 3.0 CSL Le Mans car, and that scrumptious red seat is courtesy Tom Hurley, a former sushi chef turned ‘seat guru’.

Amongst other modifications are custom CNC billet aluminium parts, again courtesy Harris Performance, including the pegs, steering head, and foldable and adjustable levers. The clip-ons are now lowered. It also gets fully adjustable telescopic suspension and twin gas-charged shock absorbers, both from Nitron, and a Baak-sourced exhaust that we are told sounds beautiful, and saves 12.8kg while at it. The wire-spoke wheels are hand-made and custom as well, and are wrapped with Bridgestone Battlax tyres. 

However, its engine – a 648cc air- and oil-cooled parallel-twin unit – remains untouched. That said, though the stock engine makes 47PS and 52.3Nm, this one may make a bit more thanks to the custom exhaust.

While there are good chances that this won’t ever hit the production line, we hope it inspires the Conti GT owners to personalise their bikes so we can see more like it here in India. If you are drooling over the beautiful fairing of this GT, worry not, as a faired Continental GT 650 was spied earlier. Considering Harris Performance made the fairing for this bike, it’s only a matter of time before Royal Enfield brings one out.