“My love of motorcycles was born when I was 3 years old and my father threw me on a three-wheeler,” W. Robert Ransom tells Maxim. Unlike many arguably overeager fathers, Ransom’s dad wasn’t even particularly interested in motorsports—rather Wayne Robert Ransom Sr. gifted his kid a motorcycle for a reason as old as time itself: as a scheme to get his girl back.
“My parents were actually divorced at that point and he needed a way to get my mother back to the house,” Ransom Jr. recalls with some amusement. “So he said, ‘I’m going to get this kid a three-wheeler and then he’ll have to be brought to my house, and I’ll get to see my ex-wife!’ It was a ploy that worked out in my favor.”
Unfortunately for Wayne Sr. the Trojan horse Yamaha TriZinger YT60 strategy failed in getting his ex-wife back full time, but it did succeed in sparking a love of motorcycles in his son that would define the course of his life. “It’s crazy,” Ransom remembers wistfully, “when I ride by the dealership that’s no longer there, I can still see where it was sitting the day he took me to pick it up. That memory is that vivid.”
“It’s no holds barred, no budget needed, as big and exotic and luxurious as we can go.”
While buying a 3-year-old a 60-cc two-stroke trike notorious for their ease in flipping over might seem mind-boggling for 21st-century parents, the auspicious gift accelerated a prodigious aptitude for all things engineering and innovation. When Wayne Sr. passed away only four years later, suddenly Wayne Jr. was burdened with the responsibility of caring for and maintaining his own motorcycles—gapping spark plugs, cleaning air filters, and changing the oil. By the age of 12 he’d begun customizing his bikes, and at 19 opened his own service and light performance shop in south New Jersey.
These skills grew until lightning struck at the age of 24. At the time he had not yet practiced any motorcycle fabrication, nor knew how to shape sheet metal. He didn’t know how to TIG weld or engineer a chassis, either. But he envisioned a new motorcycle concept, and through seven months of hard work and self-learning, Ransom taught himself how to build one from the ground up.
Obsessed with speed, The Serpent was built on the concept of optimizing a motorcycle’s ability to translate power to the asphalt. In other words, allowing a sport bike’s Herculean torque to transfer to the tires and stay planted in order to experience the full head rush of torque without flipping the thing over. So Ransom extended both the front and back wheels, stretching out the entire chassis and dropping the engine for a super low center of gravity and seat height (only 17 inches).
“We’ll just say for the record, I took it out to an unnamed location in Mexico and I ran it up to 150 miles an hour,” Ransom laughs, shaking his head. “I was sitting there—it didn’t hit me until I got back to my facility because the bike did it so effortlessly—that I’m a 24-year-old kid, no formal education in engineering or metal shaping fabrication, and I’m looking at this bike and I’m like, I cannot believe that I just did 150 miles an hour on something that I built in a 600-squarefoot facility with minimal hand tools! And my mind just started to go wild with possibility.”
With zero empirical or academic engineering or construction knowledge, the idea of a super sport bike’s tidal wave of power unleashed onto a homemade chromoly steel chassis seems like the recipe for home cooking a 150-mph roadkill mash. But it worked. Moreover, at the time Jesse James and the revival of American choppers were all the rage, meaning bikes centered around big American V-Twins. Naysayers seriously questioned, if not mocked, his use of a Suzuki GSX-R1000 powerplant. But Ransom committed wholeheartedly to his vision and didn’t waver, despite the overwhelming contemporary trends. “I always just had an innate ability to know what would work,” Ransom marvels, “and what wouldn’t.”
Roughly a dozen one-off bikes later and Ransom Motorcycles has grown from a workshop the size of a walk-in closet to a serious manufacturer, building motorcycles for wealthy fanatics spread across the globe. The trilogy of its series starts with the Valiance Collection, the “entry-level build” that launches with the Archangel—a spiritual prodigy of the earlier Serpent bike. Designed for an orthopedic surgeon, the weekend track racer found himself riding way too fast on streets. So he commissioned Ransom to build a bike that would still challenge him, but at lower speeds than he’d have to push his sport bike. Ransom imagined a two-wheeler with a fat rear tire and increased front rake, one that would slow down velocity but still engage the rider in corners like they were racing twice as fast.
“So I took The Serpent and stylized it, squashed it, stretched it, and that’s where we end up with the Archangel,” Ransom explains. Other clever touches include a hidden headlight, cantilevered engine and pneumatic suspension with its air reservoir concealed in the swing arm.
Then there’s the Legacy Collection, which launches this summer with the world’s first all-titanium motorcycle, the Titanium Transcendence (more on that below). As next level and mind-blowing as that creation might sound, Ransom aims to supersede even that with the Majesty line.
“It’s no holds barred, no budget needed, as big and as exotic and as luxurious as we can go,” the ambitious builder promises. More than simply a two-wheeled vehicle, Ransom sees the first edition of the Majesty Collection, Reign, as a piece of museum-level sculpture that electronically transforms into a rideable motorcycle. So far requiring a simply ludicrous 10,000 hours to build, the solid bronze–bodied work resembles a polished gold Anish Kapoor sculpture that unlocks and transforms on command like the star of a Michael Bay blockbuster.
“I’m a sculptor by creed,” Ransom reveals when asked where the vision came for such a singular eye-warping piece of machinery-meets-art. “Sketching is very difficult, but sculpting for me is like breathing.”
Ransom’s Titanium Transcendence Puts Pedal To The Metal
If the proposal of an all-titanium motorcycle sounds unnecessarily challenging, that’s because it is. Highly sculptural body work or fairings in the motorcycle industry are usually made of fiberglass or composites, rarely metal. And never, ever titanium. Why? Titanium is not only incredibly expensive, but the low-density, high-strength metal makes welding notoriously difficult, and its thinness is unforgiving—planishing out flaws or errors can be both arduous and time-consuming. Overall one can expect labor to be three to four times more complex over steel or aluminum.
“It really exposes all the flaws that you have as a shaper,” W. Robert Ransom admits. “The artistry is making the metal look like it was molded.” His justification for the added challenge is simple: Ransom sees the Legacy Collection as prioritizing performance, acceleration and straight-line speed over the sculptural emphasis of the Majesty Collection, while the Valiance Collection plays the Goldilocks Solution bridge between the two.
“This one’s for guys at the red light. It’s gonna blow away all other bikes.”
Throughout the Transcendence build the New Jersey workshop detailed the process on Instagram, and Ransom found followers fascinated by the titanium craftsmanship. “They were wondering if I had a background in aerospace, because normally you’re not seeing the work being done by people who shape titanium online. They’re getting paid by places like Lockheed Martin,” Ransom says of fans DMing him on IG. After all, titanium is usually reserved for aerospace and spacecraft work done behind the secretive veil of nondisclosures.
Ransom estimates that 95 percent of his inaugural Legacy offering is crafted of titanium—the entire chassis, swing arm, exhausts, fuel tank, side pedal, upper cal and body work—all titanium. About the only parts other than the Suzuki Hayabusa engine not fashioned from titanium are its carbon fiber wheels.
So it’s extremely light for its gen-two 1,340-cc, inline-four Hayabusa engine, once the powerplant for the fastest production motorcycle on the planet. Weighing in at a svelte 375 pounds dry, that should make the Titanium Transcendence not just a gorgeous objet d’art to admire but also a terrifyingly fast two-wheeler to ride. “This one’s for guys at the red light,” Ransom muses, smiling. “It’s gonna blow away all other bikes.”
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2024 issue of Maxim magazine.
Follow Deputy Editor Nicolas Stecher on Instagram at @nickstecher and @boozeoftheday.