With more than a touch of Louisiana voodoo, Confederate Motor Company introduces its most ambitious and outrageous project yet—the Wraith.

Monster Garage has a lot to answer for. The Discovery Channel’s hit series, featuring the rambunctious Jesse James as chief designer, appeals to the maverick macho spirit that lurks just under the skin of many American men. As James’ fame spreads beyond the world of cable television, so too are customized cars and motorcycles elbowing their way to the front of every loudmouth crowd.

Girder-type front end with carbon composite blades and dual cone Timken bearings at all pivot points for excellent torsional rigidity and perfect front-to-rear weight bias. Carbon Kevlar single-sided swingarm. 3.75-gallon belly fuel cell. Total claimed weight (dry): 375 lbs.

There is nothing new about all this, although the current fashion mirrors a renegade spirit that owes more to Black Hawk Down or The Terminator than it does to The Wild One, the definitive bad-biker movie. The whole custom chopper concept can be traced to the bobbers of the postwar era, when Southern California was a wide-open paradise for young, free-spirited ex-GI bikers freshly sprung from the horrors of the Pacific theater. Our young heroes stripped WD Harleys and Indians of their clunky, military bodywork, mufflers, and mechanics and dickied up the tanks with a splash or two of color. Having reduced the bike’s weight by half, a young lad could then do a modest amount of tuning to the venerable V-twin engines and have a fine hoss on which to cruise the boulevards of the Pacific coast, making as much noise and fuss as possible as he went. Not much has changed.

It is deliciously ironic that the design impulse for all these freeway choppers adheres closely to one of the rubrics of the machine age: Form should follow function. Nothing unnecessary. Everything stripped bare. Yet, while that might reflect a European trend, these bikes, with their ubiquitous V-twin engines (invented in France, interestingly), their raked forks, their chrome, and their flaming paint schemes, have come to define the all-American motorcycle. Such is the magpie essence of pop culture: Borrow, co-opt, steal, and rework until you have a style to claim as your own.

Super stiff 4-inch radial design backbone. Carbon composite seat. (Click image to enlarge)

As long as it looks and sounds great, who cares if you cannot actually ride one of these bikes for long stretches of time, or if it handles like a hormonal camel? Matt Chambers, the presiding spirit behind Confederate Motorcycles, cares. He cares deeply.

When he founded the Confederate Motor Company in the early 1990s, Chambers wanted to retain the styling keystones, the sound and the fury, of the chopper era. But at the same time, he wanted to create a high-tech motorcycle with handling and engineering equal to the best European and Japanese sport bikes.

So began a decade-long pursuit of purist engineering, performance, and styling excellence. The culmination of this lineage is the Wraith, a motorcycle that bends, stretches, warps, and strains the edges of the all-American design envelope within which Chambers sees his brand.

The Wraith’s designer and builder is J.T. Nesbitt, a talented and cerebral gentleman who includes among his inspirations the work of Alexander Calder, the celebrated American metalsmith who created beautifully balanced wire and metal sculptures that hang, turn, and float in space.

Calder’s influence is apparent in Nesbitt’s design of the Wraith. The dramatically curved tube that forms the backbone of the bike and holds the hidden rear suspension is a sculptural statement, and a bold one at that.

Nesbitt borrows from the same bob jobs and choppers that inspire James, although this is where any comparison between the two men ends. Nesbitt looks beyond the bobbers, back to the board-track racers of an earlier era, the roaring, carefree ’20s, when young bucks rode their stripped-bare Indians and Harleys around the steeply banked wooden tracks that were the forerunners of today’s banked oval race circuits. These bikes were, essentially, two wheels with a V-twin engine in the middle—no frills, not even brakes. Their only function was to go fast. The Wraith’s profile is reminiscent of a board-tracker, with two wheels sandwiching a big V-twin engine.

There is an obvious breadth to Nesbitt’s design lexicon, and he has not held back with the Wraith. The seat, canti-levered from the scaffolding pipe that serves as the bike’s frame, references some of the most wonderful two-wheeled creations of the 20th century: the glorious Neanders from Bauhaus-era Germany and the Rumi, a wonder of Italian postwar aesthetic. The front fork, an enormous parallelogram of springs, aluminum, and carbon fiber, harkens back to the Velocette KTT, a silken classic of British racing design.

	Billet link plates and embedded tachometer. Curved handlebars add to the circular design concept. (Click image to enlarge)

The rest of Nesbitt’s spectral vision is pure modernism: The scoopy bodywork and the single-sided swingarm are both cues from the Italian master, Massimo Tamburini, and his Ducati 916 or MV Agusta F4, even from the late, great John Britten and his V1000 racer, a bike of outstanding beauty and performance.

So, does the sum of these parts add up to something? It is too early to say. The two most striking features of the bike are the tubular spine and the front fork. The spine works functionally and aesthetically. As for the front fork, let’s look at it.

To be fair, the motorcycle fork has always been a problem for designers and engineers from Tokyo to Torrance. Front forks do not function very well. They go up and down just when you do not want them to (cranked hard over on a bumpy road is not when you want to have plunging, rebounding forks), they flex, they twist and shout. Center hub steering was an early attempt to solve the riddle, used on the Ner-a-Car in the 1920s and more recently on various Bimotas. But such models are heavy, expensive, and difficult to make. BMW developed its own center-hub hybrid, the telelever, which works very well. All others have adapted the simple fork familiar from bicycles for 150 years.

4-speed. Kick start only. V-Twin, Magneto ignition and Superlight rotational mass. XR base top end for better breathing at high rpm. (Click image to enlarge)

Nesbitt’s approach to the problem was ambitious. He wanted a very light, very small, very low bike, and the traditional telescopic front fork was, in his view, too big, too heavy, and too basic. The solution was the girder fork, a design that would not look out of place on a motorcycle 75 years old. It is a bold move. Light and incredibly strong, it nevertheless looks odd to our modern eyes, trained on generations of Cerianis and Brembos. Visually, it weights the bike to the front, which traditionally is not how we like our bikes to look. But adventurers of all stripes have challenged us to look again, to consider anew, to find beauty where we might not have found it before. Nesbitt certainly challenges us with his Wraith. When the bike eventually hits American roads, one thing is certain, it will turn heads and muscle its way to the front of the custom motorcycle pack, just as the bobbers and choppers did 50 years ago.

Confederate is based in New Orleans, center of the voodoo universe, and you have to hand it to Chambers and Nesbitt for having a sense of humor to match their sense of design adventure. Thankfully, they also have no sense of decorum. This Wraith, a Gothic specter of death freshly emerged from the swamps of Louisiana, deserves no such restraints.