Pioneering Santa Fe motorcycle designer James Parker dies

James Parker was a perfectionist. The Santa Fe designer spent his life in motion, designing solar homes, reimagining motorcycles, and every Sunday hiking Santa Fe Baldy.

Parker was a pioneer in motorcycle design with 15 design patents to his name. He died at 76 years old on July 11 after he was struck by a vehicle while walking on July 1.

“One of the biggest things about James was that he was a total perfectionist,” said Juan Romero, a close friend of Parker’s and a CAD designer who worked with him for years. “So, if I didn’t get something exactly right, he would always call me on it, and he would always see these miniscule details that no one else could see.”

Parker was always thinking of new ways to make motorcycles more fun, said Jeff Karr, a longtime friend. They got to know each other on an endurance motorcycle racing team together and remained friends for over 40 years.

“He had an intuitive sense of what engineering things would be improvements without making things more complicated,” Karr said. “He had a simple approach, a very elegant approach, in the way he designed things. He never lost touch with what the total machine was meant to do.”

Swingarm suspension

In the 1980s, Parker developed a swingarm front suspension system for motorcycles. The suspension system reached production in the 1993 Yamaha GTS1000 sport-tourer.

“Normally on a motorcycle, you have what’s called a telescopic fork. Basically, it’s like a big shock absorber,” said Romero.

The swingarm design incorporated the arm on one side and had everything run through a central tube to create a more stable and lighter-weight design.

“It reduced the amount of weight on the front, which gave much better handling,” Romero said. “It also allowed less suspension variability as it went up and down.”

Yamaha licensed the design, but not all of the design elements were incorporated into the bikes it produced, said Romero, and the end product did not handle the way Parker intended.

“But he kept plugging away at it and hopefully one day, someone will try to put it into a complete design,” Romero said.

An artist’s eye

Parker drew designs by hand and didn’t care much for computers. Romero would put Parker’s designs into CAD so that Parker could see every nuance before the parts were machined.

“He always said that having the computer was getting too easy and people really couldn’t visualize in their minds how all these parts interrelated,” Romero said. “He knew how he wanted things to go, and he could visualize these things in his head.”

Growing up, Parker loved model airplanes and was very good at building them, said Cynthia Parker, James Parker’s older sister. His early love for models foretold a long career in home and motorcycle design.

“He was an artist, as was our mother, and that really drove him,” said Cynthia Parker. “He didn’t want to put out anything that wasn’t essentially, absolutely perfect, ever.”

Parker graduated from Claremont Men’s College and earned a degree in design at Stanford University, spent some time in India as part of the Peace Corps, and became a partner in a custom architectural design and construction firm in Santa Fe. He built many solar homes around “the city different.”

Motorcycles and mountains

In his free time, Parker raced motorcycles and began tinkering with the design of bikes for fun.

“Eventually, it just kind of consumed him and he said, I want to do this full time, and that’s when his obsession and his love for designing a better motorcycle started,” Romero said.

Parker left an archive of 700 drawings behind in the care of Romero. Some of Parker’s prototypes are at the Barber Advanced Design Center, where they’re used as engineering and design examples for other designers and engineers.

In the ‘80s, Parker opened a rad new business, Rationally Advanced Design Development, to work on motorcycle design concepts.

Throughout his career Parker worked on high-end sports car engine designs and different racing motorcycle concepts. He designed the chassis and powertrain layout for the Mission R electric road racer that dominated the 2011 TTXGP/FIM electric motorcycle race at Laguna Seca.

“He was a very progressive guy, even though he worked in an old gasoline motorcycle field,” Karr said.

The Monterey, California motorcycle race included some of the fastest bikes in the world at the time. The race time that electric bike set held for 11 years and was only recently beaten.

Parker was also a hardcore hiker who hiked Baldy every Sunday for years. Many of his best design ideas came to him during a hike in the mountains, Karr said. When health issues made it difficult for him to hike, Parker took up long walks around Santa Fe.

“He just loved Santa Fe,” Romero said. “It meant everything to him, and the mountains were his total love and obsession after the motorcycles.”