This Man Wants To Build You A Scooter That Looks Like A Vespa, But Has 67 HP And Goes 120 MPH

The terms “scooter” and “performance” aren’t typically found in the same sentence. With exceptions for great machines like the Suzuki Burgman 650, most scooters are slow little things perfect for zipping around town in style. Some people think scooters can be more, much more. John Piper is taking his experience from designing Group B rally cars and Formula 1 cars and is baking it into a ridiculous scooter. The Piper Moto J-Series is a super scooter with a KTM 690 SMC R engine making 67 HP, a top speed of 120 mph, and drop-dead gorgeous styling.

The Moto J joins a fun niche of motorcycling known as the maxi-scooter. Maxis combine the speed and stability of a motorcycle with the practicality and ease of use of a scooter. The most famous maxi-scooter is the aforementioned Suzuki Burgman 650, a big machine that massages 55 HP out of a 638 cc parallel twin. Recently, I showed you the Italjet Dragster 559, a sportbike pretending to be a scooter with 58.33 HP on tap. The Burgman is a porky 618 pounds while the Italjet is a light 425 pounds. The Piper Moto J-Series promises to be better than both of them with less weight and even more power, plus a fantastic body.

The Piper Moto J-Series has been around for a while. Motorcycle blogs have been spilling ink about the thing since around 2016, and every article used the same render-esque images from Piper Moto’s site. I began to think this thing was vaporware. However, last year a real working version of this very scooter made an appearance at London’s Bike Shed Show. So, it does exist! John Piper wants some people to order some of these scooters, but be ready to cough up $50,732 for one.

John Piper

Perhaps it’s best to talk about the man bringing this scooter into reality. This isn’t a machine being hacked together in a shed, but it comes from an engineer with an impressive portfolio.

As Motorsport magazine wrote in 2022, John Piper has spent more than 40 years of his life in motorsport. Piper, 71, doesn’t just work on creating super-fast scooters, but he also runs Piper Special Vehicles, a shop that specializes in re-engineering, restoring, and improving classic cars. He’ll even put an EV drivetrain in your vintage ride if you want him to.

Before he restored vintage British iron, Piper enjoyed a career working for big names in racing. Piper says that as a teenager, he was obsessed with tuning cars to perform better than they did originally. This led him to his schooling at Kingston Polytechnic, where he earned an engineering degree that he put to work immediately as a mechanic for a club racer.

From those humble beginnings, half a century ago, Piper took on his first role with a professional racing team by becoming a mechanic for David Price Racing Formula 3 team. The team had notable drivers Tiff Needell and Ian Taylor. Piper was Taylor’s mechanic. Later, Piper would become chief mechanic and worked on cars driven by Nigel Mansell.

Piper says it was McLaren chief mechanic Ian Dyer who got him into car design. Dyer taught Piper the trade and eventually, Piper found himself under the wing of Patrick Head of Williams Grand Prix Engineering. There, Piper made his mark on the Metro 6R4 Group B rally car for British Leyland. Reportedly, this racer was supposed to have a V8 up front, but Piper and the rest of the engineering team couldn’t do that, not if they wanted any room for a driver. Instead, the engine was placed in the rear, and it became a six rather than an eight. Piper drew the suspension, mechanicals, and transmission. He was also a test driver for the vehicle.

Piper says his next milestone would be moving to race engineer at Williams F1 for racer Nigel Mansell. Piper’s work in the 1985 season was on the FW10 racer’s transmission and rear end. Then, Piper became a design engineer at Benetton F1, where he designed F1 transmissions and suspension dampers. Piper’s site continues with his achievements:

Recruited as Founder Technical Director of Prodrive Engineering and led the design of the four wheel drive system for the Subaru World Rally Car.

Asked by Ross Brawn the Technical Director, to join [Tom Walkinshaw Racing] for the Jaguar XJR14 Group C sports car as Chief Designer to lead the design of the transmission system and day to day management of the design office. Winning Le Mans with the team in 1990 and the World Championship in 1991.

I spent a year as the Race Engineer for the Harrods sponsored McLaren F1 GTR sports car finishing in 3rd place at Le Mans 1995 with Derek Bell, Justin Bell and Andy Wallace driving.

From there, Piper’s career includes being the chief designer of the Ford Indigo Concept car, working on the Panoz GT1 Le Mans racer, and in 2005, becoming the chief designer for the JCB Dieselmax land speed car. By the way, that car, with Thrust SSC driver Andy Green at the controls, set the diesel land speed record of 350.092 mph. Piper says his firm designed Dieselmax in five months, built it, and tested it.

A Lambretta On Steroids

Piper entered the motorcycle world when he designed the Foggy Petronas World Superbike. Later, his Piper Design would be hired by Suzuki to design the GSX-R600 concept. Piper says he’s personally sitting on a stash of eleven motorcycles in his shed.

According to an interview with the UK’s Bike, Piper got the idea to build the J-Series in 2013 when he was looking for a new two-wheeler. Piper wanted something that rode like a motorcycle but looked like a scooter. Basically, he wanted what he said was a “Lambretta on steroids.” Unfortunately, the current crop of maxi-scooters don’t really fit that definition. The Suzuki Burgman is definitely a scooter that rides like a motorcycle, not really a motorcycle that looks like a scooter.

Given the dearth of this specific kind of scooter, Piper set out to make his own. He started by benchmarking popular maxi-scooters, including the Suzuki Burgman 650, the Yamaha T-Max, and the BMW C 650 GT. Piper found that each maxi-scooter was different, so he decided to take the best traits of all of the scooters and blend them into one gnarly machine. He wanted to beat each scooter at length, weight, seat height, braking, power, and lean angle.

To kick off the project, Piper picked up a KTM 690 SMC R that he got for a discount. Aiding him in the creation of the J-Series were students from the University of the West of England and Steve Everitt, a designer who now works at Royal Enfield.

Piper’s wishlist included a 55-degree lean angle, a curb weight of around 160 kg, and a perfect 50/50 weight distribution. What he built comes pretty close. The Piper Moto J-Series sports 17-inch wheels, a 52-degree lean angle, and a dry weight of 352 pounds, right on target. The KTM 690 SMC R gave its 690cc single for the project. In this guise, it’s making 67 HP.

That engine is sitting in a custom TIG welded chrome molybdenum tubular steel space frame with a carbon composite body on top. Piper gave the body a body that’s a nod to Italian scooters and the finish was done so well it looks like metal. However, Piper couldn’t give this a metal body if he wanted to meet that weight target. Attached to the frame are the forks from a KTM Duke 200, where you’ll find a 17-inch front wheel with the 690 SMC R’s brakes. Why the different forks? Apparently, the forks from the SMC R were too long.

Speaking of brakes, a 320 mm disc is chomped on by four-piston Brembo calipers. A 240 mm disc takes up the rear and is clamped down on with a Brembo single-piston caliper. The rear suspension is handled with a concentric spring and EXE-TC remote two-way shock.

Piper notes that the scooter still has a six-speed transmission and there’s still a clutch, but now, gearchanges are done through the touch of a button. That makes sense since a manual foot shifter would certainly get in the way of the bodywork. The scooter requires a special radiator, its own exhaust, and a fuel tank for everything to work. For those, Piper called up his specialist friends from his racing engineering days.

Piper says the scooter-cycle will accelerate to 60 mph and race on to a top speed of 120 mph. However, since this scoot was designed to go this fast, you don’t need nerves of steel to do it. Is it the fastest scooter in the world? Probably not. We’ve seen even crazier custom builds before. In case you were wondering, the J-Series is registered as a KTM since the bike uses the donor bike’s serial numbers.

But unlike those custom builds, you can buy one of these, sort of. Piper says he’s not putting the J-Series into production, but he will sell his personal example. He’s also willing to custom-build a J-Series for anyone willing to pay the price. However, Piper warns that anyone wanting him to build one of these will need at least £40,000 ($50,732), more if they have any special requests. He does run a custom shop, after all.

What you’ll get out of the other end is something that looks like an Italian scooter, but has the power to thrill. It’s the best of both worlds as you get a motorcycle, but the comfortable and stylish ride of a scooter. Get me a passport, I have to ride this thing!

Hat Tip to Mr.Ontop of Opposite-Lock!

(Images: Piper Moto, unless otherwise noted.)