Published:
By Leslie Virostek
After serving five and a half years in the Marine Corps — including a seven-month deployment in Afghanistan — Tony Audette was ready to shift gears.
When he enrolled at Central Connecticut State University in 2012, Audette selected Mechanical Engineering Technology as his major. He liked to fix things, and it seemed doable to the former heavy machine gunner, who says he was not a huge fan of school. But his academic advisor, Dr. Luz Amaya, pushed back, insisting that he could become a mechanical engineer.
“I don’t think I can do the math,” Audette told her.
Amaya responded, “College is where you learn the math.”
Audette would go on to graduate in 2016 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and launch his own motorcycle manufacturing company. Today he calls that exchange with Amaya a conversation that changed the entire course of his life.
“It really didn’t occur to me that I could make and design things. I learned how to learn,” he says.
Founded in 2019, Audette Motorcycles manufactures aftermarket specialty parts and a single motorcycle model: the Velos “American superbike.” Inspired by the leaner, simpler bikes of the early 20th century, Audette engineered it with a focus on performance, with 128 horsepower and 156 foot-pounds of torque. Unabashedly analog, the Velos has no unnecessary gadgets or electronics — nothing that can come between the rider and the thrill of operating the vehicle.
Yet, there’s an attention to detail that belies the apparent simplicity of the bike. Each one is built to ergonomically correspond to the body measurements and personal preferences of the rider purchasing it.
When Audette displays the Velos at auto shows, he likes to “let people interact with it uninterrupted.” He watches silently while they take in the whole vehicle, get up close to examine the small details, and zoom out again. The fact that people often react to it like it’s a work art is a kind of validation — of the concept that came from his imagination and of the vehicle itself.
The road to that accomplishment was a challenging one. What began at Central continued with key internships, including one with an aerospace company. But when Audette later applied for a design position there, he was told that he was more qualified to work on the manufacturing side. That seemed backwards to Audette, who viewed his manufacturing experience as a key asset.
He says, “I knew that if I knew how to make something, I could design it better.”
Motivated by his lifelong love of motorcycles, Audette took a position building bikes for a boutique manufacturer. But all the while, he was dreaming up a more perfect motorcycle.
“I did a sketch on a piece of paper and had it hanging in my bedroom,” he says, “and I looked at it every day.”
With that sketch as his inspiration, Audette quit his job and launched his own business. At first, he focused on manufacturing specialty parts, such as see-through cam covers for Indian Thunder Stroke motors and velocity stacks designed to give an engine more power without creating more pollution.
Meanwhile, he had engaged the services of Kar Lee, a London-based motorcycle concept designer whose renderings often appeared in glossy magazines.
“I sent over some hand sketches and a detailed 10-page design scope filled with reference pictures of details and comments of how I want my parts to be,” says Audette. The final visualization enabled him to “get all the ideas out and 'seen' so I wasn't trying to pull it out of my head as I went,” he explains. The design process went on to include CAD modeling and 3D printing.
It wasn’t until July 2022 that Audette finished the Velos prototype. By chance, Lee was in New York a few weeks later. The two men met for first time, and Lee became the first person other than Audette to test drive his motorcycle. After riding along the winding stretches of Route 9, Lee declared, “I’ve never had anything set my soul on fire like this.”
And that is exactly what Audette was hoping to achieve. When you ride one of his motorcycles, he says, “You become part of it.”
Described by those who know him well as the kind of person who finds a way or makes one, Audette admits to being a bit of a perfectionist, but only in the way typical to engineers. He says the quest to keep improving something must eventually become subservient to the need to declare the job done.
As he grows his business, Audette will continue to marry an engineer’s precision with a motorcycle lover’s sensibility.
“I’m extremely passionate about what I do,” he says. “It has my name on it.”
