Zontes builds three cylinders with 1000 cc – the details

A year ago, the Chinese manufacturer Zontes announced that it was developing a three-cylinder motorcycle engine. Now there are first pictures.

Motorsport highlights twice a week straight to your inbox.

The Zontes brand is well-known in Germany as a manufacturer of 125cc motorcycles and in the first six months of this year was number 6 in brand registration statistics. The top model is the Zontes 125 G1/U, of which 848 were newly registered in Germany in the first half of 2022. In Germany, sales are made by Distribike, a subsidiary of the Italian manufacturer Beta.

With the three-cylinder engine, Zontes is sort of leapfrogging the stage of the two-cylinder engine that Chinese manufacturers are currently installing in a similar configuration on their mainly domestic-market motorcycles.

Zontes wants to offer the in-line three-cylinder with 650 and 1000 ccm. In the engine housings shown, the cylinder bores are so close together that a further increase in displacement would only be possible if the stroke were lengthened.

The engine works with a conventional crank pin offset of 120 degrees, and a balancer shaft is installed to prevent vibrations. The cylinder head with four valves per cylinder and two overhead camshafts is conventional engine construction.

Zontes reports a rev limit of 13,000 rpm and a compression ratio of 13.5:1. It may be that this high compression figure indicates that China has more knock-resistant petrol than the West.

Naturally, heretics immediately ask which motor Zontes copied. Well, the Triumph Street Triple’s engine looks quite different, and differences can also be found with the Yamaha MT-09 engine.