Bad Winners is one of those shops that consistently do good work. It?s owned by Frenchman Walid Ben Lamine, who has an unusual and very performance-focused CV?including stints as a championship rower and a race team mechanic.
It?s not surprising that the machines he puts together in his workshop in the 19th arrondissement of Paris are clean, thoughtfully specc?d, and designed to perform. Like this XJR1300, which took two years to build and will comfortably outpace a showroom bike.

The XJR1300 was one of the best of the old school muscle bikes: an air-cooled cruiser in sporty clothing that handled well around town, and packed a solid wallop out on the open road.
The US never got the XJR, but it remained on sale in Europe and Oceania until a couple of years ago, with fuel injection and clever ECU programming keeping it on the right side of emissions regulations. But the Euro4 standards (and a lack of ABS) finally killed it off.
?We got the bike from a garage in the middle of France that was closing down,? Walid tells us. ?It was in good condition, with 29,000 km on the clock.?
It?s a 2005-spec XJR, so the 98-horsepower, 1251 cc inline four engine is probably just run in.

That didn?t stop Walid from tearing down the motor, though. By installing Wiseco pistons and boring out the cylinders, he?s bumped the capacity up to a hefty 1390 cc and fitted a custom ECU that he can program for optimum performance.
Walid has also fitted shorter intake pipes and a DynoJet Stage 1 c...