Cotton/Cross Cougar

For decades the Villiers company had provided their engines to almost the entire British two-stroke motorcycle manufacturers such as Francis Barnett, James, Ambassador, Excelsior and so many others. Cotton Motorcycles based at Gloucester also installed Villiers engines into their range of road going and competition models. Success in road race, trials and scrambles competitions attracting the attention of the buying public was regarded as vitally important to sales. It was most likely that this persuaded Pat Onions the Works Director at Cotton to travel the 40 miles to Bath and make an approach to Roland Cross at Cross Manufacturing Company seeking his known expertise to design a modification to the Villiers 34A competition engine that would give Cotton the `edge` over fierce rivals Greeves and others. Roland Cross forever the ingenious engineer would present a design that incorporated his tried and tested Cross aluminium liner-less cylinder barrel together with a revolutionary spiral piston `ring`. This arrangement would eliminate the fall-off of power traditionally associated with two-strokes at very high revs or when extremely hot. With the Roland Cross arrangement there was a considerable improvement in power and performance with a 250cc Cotton/Cross Cougar ridden by Bryan “Badger” Goss the Cotton Works rider swept the board at the 1961 Somerset Grand National Scramble winning every race. The motorcycle exhibited is the project development bike from the Cross Manufacturing Co. museum. Displayed by kind permission of Richard & Edward Cross (Directors).