Something has gone wrong with custom motorcycles. Not recently — it's been going wrong for a while now, accumulating quietly like rust under paint, and at this point the whole scene has calcified into a set of aesthetics so predictable you could generate them with a checklist. The flat tracker with the number plate nobody races. The "scrambler" that has never seen dirt and never will, built with knobby tires and a high exhaust and an Instagram account that already has the grid planned out before the first bolt is turned. The café racer with the clip-ons and the brown leather seat and the word "bespoke" deployed somewhere in the product copy as though anyone still believes it means something. Every other build is a BMW boxer or a Triumph Bonneville or a Honda CB wearing a different hat, and the magazines cover them all with the same breathless language — "a stunning reimagining," "stripped to its essence," "raw and purposeful" — words that have been drained of meaning through repetition until they function as nothing more than wallpaper for the algorithm.
The custom bike world has become, in other words, a genre. It has conventions and tropes and an audience that knows what it wants and gets it, over and over, in slightly different packaging. The bikes look good. They photograph well. They perform adequately at the handful of events where performance is even nominally tested. And almost none of them have anything interesting to say, because the entire apparatus — the builders, the media, the brands writing checks — has converged on a shared visual language that prioritizes surface over substance, recognizability over risk, and looking like a motorcycle enthusiast over actually riding the thing you built.
David Borras finds this boring. He has said so, in terms considerably less diplomatic than these, in interviews scattered across a decade of motorcycle journalism. He has called the industry disrespectful and cheesy. He has described its terminology — scrambler, bobber, tracker — as labels imposed by people with no talent and too many meetings. He builds motorcycles out of a garage in Bergondo, a town of about seven thousand people in Galicia, the green and rain-soaked northwest corner of Spain, and he has been doing it since 2009 under the name El Solitario MC, and in all that time he has never once built a bike that looks like it belongs in the current landscape of custom motorcycles. This is not an accident. It is the entire point.
"It bores me to death. But I might know too much and I'm getting grumpy with age — I just wanna ride."
— David Borras, Gear Patrol
El Solitario's mandate, from the beginning, has been simple in principle and almost impossible in practice: every motorcycle they build has to be ridden. Not trailered to a show and positioned under lights and admired from a respectful distance and then trailered home. Ridden. Across deserts, through races, down highways, into situations where the only thing that matters is whether the engine starts and the frame holds. This single rule — that the bike must function as a bike — turns out to be a surprisingly radical position in a world where the most celebrated customs are often the ones least likely to leave the showroom floor.
The Winning Loser
The name is the manifesto. A 1947 Harley-Davidson Knucklehead — the kind of engine that collectors treat as sacred and lock behind glass, the kind that changes hands at auction for figures that could buy a house in most of the world — rebuilt not as a museum piece or a concours entry but as a bare, rideable, slightly dangerous thing that looks like it was recovered from a barn fire and then ridden home through the rain. The Winning Loser was one of El Solitario's earliest builds, and it established the governing logic for everything that followed: take something that other people treat as precious, strip away everything that exists to impress, and build what remains into something honest enough to actually use.
The Knucklehead engine is a pre-war design that leaks oil as a feature rather than a flaw, a mechanical artifact so completely analog and indifferent to modern engineering that riding one feels less like operating a vehicle and more like negotiating with a living thing that has its own opinions about where you're going. Borras saw something essential in that indifference — a refusal to be optimized or streamlined or brought into line with contemporary expectations — and the bike he built around it reflects the same stubbornness. It is not pretty by the standards of the custom show circuit. It is too raw, too unfinished-looking, too clearly a machine built to be used rather than admired. Which is, of course, exactly the point, and the name — the winning loser — captures the whole El Solitario philosophy in two contradictory words: you can lose by every conventional measure and still come out ahead if you built the thing entirely on your own terms.
"We do not produce show bikes, as we despise that genre — understanding that it is a shame to spend countless hours constructing a supposedly liberating instrument like a motorcycle, for the sole purpose of looking at it."
— David Borras, Bike EXIF
Malo/Bueno
Bad/Good. The name, again, is the thesis — contradiction held in tension, both halves true simultaneously, neither one winning. El Solitario built the Malo/Bueno on a Harley-Davidson Sportster 1200R, which is exactly the kind of platform that the custom world's self-appointed tastemakers tend to dismiss: too small and too plain for the American Harley crowd, who want their bikes heavy and loud and draped in chrome, and too heavy and too American for the European custom scene, which has spent the last decade gravitating toward lighter, more nimble platforms with better-sounding names on the tank. The Sportster is the middle child of motorcycling, perpetually caught between identities, and Borras took that identity crisis and turned it into the entire concept of the build.
The result is a motorcycle that refuses to resolve into a single clean idea, which is El Solitario's signature move applied to an overlooked platform. It's simultaneously crude and considered, American and European, something that gets more coherent the longer you sit with it rather than less, which is the exact opposite of how most custom bikes work — most customs hit you with their concept in the first three seconds and then have nothing left to offer. The Malo/Bueno asks you to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time and not try to resolve them, which is a surprisingly difficult thing for a motorcycle to do and an even more difficult thing for the custom world to celebrate, accustomed as it is to bikes that can be summarized in a single hashtag.
Trimotoro
A three-wheeled motorcycle, which is either a contradiction in terms or a provocation depending on how seriously you take the word "motorcycle," and El Solitario clearly thinks the answer should be "not very." The Trimotoro — a name Borras made up, because no existing word described what he was building — is one of those projects that operates primarily as a question: what if you took everything people expect from a custom motorcycle, every assumption about form and function and the basic physics of the thing, and broke the most fundamental rule of all? Not the aesthetic rules, which every builder breaks as a matter of course, but the structural one. The one about how many wheels the machine is supposed to have.
The Trimotoro doesn't make sense as a custom show entry, and it doesn't make much sense as a practical vehicle, and it makes perfect sense as an object built by people who think the custom motorcycle industry's biggest problem is that it has forgotten how to have fun. The whole scene has gotten so invested in looking serious — the moody photography, the artisanal vocabulary, the solemn reverence for heritage — that it's lost the capacity for play, for absurdity, for building something just to see if it works and laughing about it either way. The Trimotoro is El Solitario's reminder that motorcycles started as experiments, as weird machines cobbled together in workshops by people who weren't sure what they were making, and that the spirit of the experiment is worth preserving even after the industry has industrialized.
"With our motorcycles we look to create an impact on the viewer, and this does not necessarily mean to please their eyes."
— David Borras, BMW Motorrad
Petardo
Petardo means firecracker in Spanish, but it's also slang for a spectacular failure — a dud, a flop, the thing that was supposed to explode and just sat there sputtering. Naming a motorcycle Petardo is the kind of move that makes marketing people nervous and makes everyone else grin, because it announces upfront that the builder is more interested in the attempt than the outcome, more drawn to the risk of failure than to the safety of competence. El Solitario gave this name first to a Yamaha SR build and later to a Ducati 900S revival, and in both cases the name functions as a dare — a challenge to the viewer to decide whether the bike is a triumph or a disaster, with El Solitario clearly comfortable with either verdict.
The Ducati version was a comeback build, a return to the project after the original had been shelved, which adds another layer of meaning to the name — the dud that came back, the failure that refused to stay dead. There's something very El Solitario about that narrative arc, about the willingness to return to something that didn't work the first time and try again without pretending the failure didn't happen. Most builders curate their stories to emphasize the inevitable triumph; Borras seems just as interested in the shelving, the doubt, the long pause before picking the wrench back up, as he is in the motorcycle that eventually emerges from the other end of the process.
Baula
Named for the leatherback sea turtle — baula in Spanish — this build drew its conceptual energy from the organic, the massive, and the slow-moving, which is about as far from the custom motorcycle mainstream as you can get without leaving the category entirely. Where most custom bikes aspire to look fast standing still, all tension and forward lean and aggressive angles, the Baula was designed to feel like a living thing moving at its own ancient pace: heavy, unhurried, carrying the weight of evolutionary time in its silhouette. A whale in a sea of speedboats. A creature that has survived for a hundred million years by being exactly what it is and ignoring every environmental pressure to become something else.
The Impostor
If the Winning Loser was El Solitario's opening statement — a declaration of values, a flag planted — then the Impostor might be their most important work, the build where the philosophy stopped being just a set of principles and became something closer to art. Built on a BMW R nineT, which is probably the single most popular platform in the modern custom world, a bike so ubiquitous that Bike EXIF could run a different R nineT build every week and never run out of material, the Impostor did something that almost no other builder has been willing to do with this platform: instead of adding personality, it stripped personality away. Instead of making the bike more, it made it less. Less visible, less present, less real.
Borras based the design on the wireframe models used in wind tunnel testing — the skeletal digital representations that exist before the real bike does, the ghost in the machine rendered as geometry and nothing else. He wanted to build the thing that isn't real, the spirit of a motorcycle rather than the motorcycle itself, and the result is a bike that looks like it's in the process of either materializing or disappearing, caught mid-transition between the digital and the physical. It was exhibited at Homo Faber in Venice, the craft exhibition that gathers artisans and makers from across Europe, and it belonged there in a way that most custom motorcycles would not — not because it was the most beautifully made, but because it raised the most interesting questions about what making means, about the relationship between the object and the idea of the object, about whether a motorcycle can be a concept and still get ridden.
"I always need the name first, before I can define the character of a project. I called the bike the Impostor because it is not real. It is a spirit, inspired by the wireframe models of a wind tunnel."
— David Borras, BMW Motorrad
Big Bad Wolf
The Big Bad Wolf was built on a Yamaha XJR, which is a big, muscular, deeply unfashionable inline-four from the nineties — the kind of bike that gets overlooked by custom builders because it doesn't have the right heritage narrative, doesn't come with a ready-made mythology the way a Triumph or a BMW boxer does, and is frankly too brutish and too loud to photograph well in the soft morning light that has become the custom world's default visual register. El Solitario debuted it at Glemseck 101, the German sprint race event, and they debuted it by racing it, which matters, because most customs that show up at events like Glemseck are there to be seen, not to compete. The Big Bad Wolf was built to go fast in a straight line and to sound like it was doing so with genuine hostility, and it accomplished both objectives with the kind of graceless efficiency that the custom world tends to polish away in favor of something more photogenic.
The name follows El Solitario's naming convention — fairy tale villains, folk monsters, things that frighten children — and unlike most custom bikes with menacing names, this one actually earned its reputation by showing up, lining up, and running. There is a tradition in the custom world of naming bikes after predators and then never subjecting them to anything more threatening than a photo shoot, and the Big Bad Wolf's refusal to participate in that particular charade is one of the quieter ways El Solitario makes its point about what motorcycles are for.
"We are more interested in the exaltation of radness."
— David Borras, Gear Patrol
Mononoke
Named for the Miyazaki film — Princess Mononoke, the girl raised by wolves who fights to protect the forest from industrialization, which is not the worst metaphor for what El Solitario is doing in the custom motorcycle world — this Ducati 350 race build is one of their most poetic machines. Built for Wheels & Waves, the surf-and-motorcycle festival on the Basque coast that El Solitario helped shape into what it is today, the Mononoke was designed specifically to race at the Puntas lighthouse sprint, a flat-out dash along the clifftops that is as beautiful and as slightly unhinged as the event itself.
Consider the geography of this particular machine: a small-displacement Italian single, race-prepped and stripped down, renamed after a Japanese animated character by a Spanish builder for a French festival held on the Basque coast. That sentence is El Solitario's entire identity compressed into a single build — aggressively international, deeply personal, drawing from whatever cultural reservoir happens to have the right water in it, and completely unconcerned with whether any of it makes sense to anyone outside the garage in Bergondo where it was conceived. The Mononoke doesn't need to make sense. It needs to start on the line and run fast enough to justify the name. Everything else is somebody else's problem.
Desert Wolves
This is where the philosophy left the garage and entered the landscape, where the ideas that had been expressed through individual builds were tested against something larger than a racetrack or a show floor. The Desert Wolves project began with a premise so absurd it could only have come from people who were either very brave or very uninterested in being taken seriously: take three Harley-Davidson motorcycles — heavy, road-bound, American, designed for highways and the particular kind of low-speed cruising that involves arriving somewhere conspicuously — and prepare them for a 2,500-mile crossing of the Sahara Desert. Harleys in the Sahara. It sounds like a joke, and it might have started as one, but they actually did it.
The Desert Wolves marked a real shift in what El Solitario was doing. Where earlier builds were about aesthetics and philosophy and naming, the Sahara project was about survival, about engineering under constraint so severe that anything decorative burned away in the first hundred miles of sand. The bikes had to function in heat that warps metal, on terrain that swallows wheels, in isolation so complete that a mechanical failure means something considerably more serious than a tow truck. Everything that didn't serve the crossing was removed, and what remained was the purest expression of Borras's founding principle — that motorcycles must be ridden — pushed to its logical extreme. The Dirt Wolves T-Shirt and the Wolf MX Jerseys were designed for this same kind of riding — gear you can actually use, not gear you wear to look like you use it.
"I'm very pessimistic. I see no hope for motorcycles and see them as an anachronistic glitch of the establishment. We live in the era of control and motorcycles don't abide."
— David Borras, Gazpacho
Marrajo
The Marrajo — named for the mako shark, the fastest shark in the ocean — is a Harley-Davidson custom that represents the most recent chapter of El Solitario's ongoing argument with the motorcycle industry. If the early builds were about establishing an identity, and the middle period was about testing that identity against the desert and the race track, then the Marrajo is about refinement in the predatory sense: everything unnecessary removed, everything remaining sharpened to a single purpose, the way a shark is refined not through decoration but through the elimination of drag.
Pluto
The Pluto is a Zaeta 530 DT — an Italian flat-track racer powered by a 528cc single making sixty horsepower at a weight of 255 pounds, which is roughly half what a Harley weighs and produces a power-to-weight ratio that borders on irresponsible for a machine designed to be ridden sideways around a dirt oval with no front brake. El Solitario built it with a custom aluminum girder fork by the founder of Kineo Wheels, carbon fiber bodywork from IXO, Öhlins suspension, and Motogadget controls, and then Borras did something that captured the project's personality better than any spec sheet could: he rode it a thousand miles on pavement to Dirt Quake V in England and then raced it on the dirt it was designed for, which is the kind of thing you do when you believe a motorcycle isn't finished until it's been tested against something harder than a photographer's eye.
The name is planetary and cold and distant, which suits a machine that looks like it arrived from somewhere the rules are different. The Zaeta platform is obscure enough that most people in the custom world have never heard of it, which is part of the appeal for El Solitario — building on a platform that nobody recognizes means you can't rely on heritage or brand cachet, and whatever the finished machine communicates has to come entirely from the work itself. We have a Pluto T-Shirt collaboration with EIN883 — designed to commemorate the build.
Commando
The Commando is the bike that proves El Solitario isn't interested in nostalgia, even if nostalgia is what the custom world would prefer them to sell. Built on a 2021 Cake Kalk OR — a Swedish electric off-road motorcycle that weighs sixty-seven kilograms, runs silent, produces no emissions, and looks nothing like anything the custom scene has traditionally celebrated — the Commando represents El Solitario's answer to a question that the rest of the industry has been avoiding: what happens when the regulations finally catch up? You go off-road. You go electric. You go where the rules haven't followed yet.
The Commando was unveiled at the first Elektrafuture event in Saint-Tropez in 2020, hand-painted by Pau's Speed Shop with El Solitario's signature raccoon artwork. It runs on custom Öhlins suspension with Excel rims and Dunlop Geomax tires, and none of those details matter as much as the philosophical statement the bike makes by existing at all. Electric propulsion isn't a compromise — it's a tactical move, a way of staying free in a regulatory landscape that is systematically closing every other exit. The Commando doesn't need to pass emissions testing because it has no emissions. It doesn't trigger noise ordinances because it's silent. It is, in its own quiet way, the most outlaw thing El Solitario has ever built. The Lone Wolf Goatskin Gloves were part of the Commando project shoot.
Prometeo
The most recent build, and arguably the most ambitious. The Prometeo — named for Prometheus, the titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity and was punished with eternal torment for the crime of sharing power with the powerless — was unveiled at EICMA 2024, the Milan motorcycle show, built in collaboration with Royal Enfield and the London-based lighting design studio Waldemeyer. El Solitario describes it as a requiem for freedom in a world that is eagerly surrendering to surveillance and control and the suffocating promise of mandated safety, which is a heavy thing to call a motorcycle but not an inaccurate description of what the Prometeo represents: the last flicker of fire before the gods take it back.
The Prometeo is built on a Royal Enfield Guerrilla 450, which is a modest and accessible platform — not the kind of exotic donor bike that typically headlines a show like EICMA — and the Waldemeyer collaboration adds a lighting element that transforms the machine into something that reads less like a motorcycle and more like a ceremonial object, a torch being carried through darkness. The build positions 2050 as the deadline, the year by which EU regulations intend to reduce road fatalities to near zero through the gradual elimination of anything that can't be controlled by software. Motorcycles, which require human skill and human attention and human risk, don't survive in that world. The Prometeo is El Solitario's way of acknowledging that fact and refusing to accept it quietly.
The Thread
Fifteen-plus custom builds over fifteen years, spanning a 1947 Knucklehead and a three-wheeled experiment and a fleet of Harleys prepped for the Sahara and a BMW turned into a wireframe ghost and an Italian flat tracker ridden a thousand miles to its own race and a silent electric off-roader and a Royal Enfield turned into a lit funeral pyre for the age of freedom, and the thread running through all of them is the same: these are motorcycles built by someone who believes the act of building matters more than the object you end up with, that riding matters more than showing, and that naming a motorcycle is as serious and as personal as building one. The Winning Loser. Malo/Bueno. Petardo. Impostor. These aren't marketing names generated by a creative agency. They're self-descriptions — ironic, contradictory, a little bit self-deprecating, drawn from fairy tales and marine biology and the Spanish language's particular genius for words that hold two meanings at once.
"People don't like freedom and they get violent when they sit in front of it."
— David Borras
That quote hangs over everything El Solitario does, a dark star that the whole operation orbits. The custom motorcycle world has grown into a global spectacle, and Borras looks at all of it and sees control dressed up as freedom, commerce wearing rebellion's jacket. His response is to stay in Galicia, keep naming his bikes after wolves and sharks and ghosts and explosions, keep insisting that the motorcycle is a verb — something you do, a way of being in the world — rather than a noun you own and photograph for strangers on the internet.
At El Solitario, only outlaws will be free. The rest of us pay shipping.
We carry El Solitario MC apparel and riding gear at Pemulis Water & Power — Rascal Motorcycle Pants, the Hong Jacket, Tactical Vests, Sparkplug Deerskin Gloves, and the rest. Built by the same people, with the same philosophy applied to a different material.