When Shiro Nakajima isn’t tinkering away in his workshop or storming the B-roads around the foothills of the Yatsugatake Mountains, you’ll find him at the track. He’s a regular face on Japan’s classic racing scene, and is just as happy piloting race bikes as he is building them. Even when he’s working on a classic café racer or restomod for a client, the man behind 46Works can’t help but imbue it with a sense of track-ready performance.
Nakajima-san typically uses older donor bikes for his projects, but he’s not opposed to spinning spanners on newer machines. So when the Japanese leather racing suit manufacturer Kushitani asked him to customize a 2023-model Aprilia RS 660, he jumped right in.
Picking an Aprilia for the project wasn’t random.…