The Ultimate Vee
The Ultimate Vee
AT LARGE
OKAY, EVERYBODY AGREES THAT Harley-Davidson would be foolish to attempt to conquer the world by trying to build as many different kinds of bikes as, say, Honda. But what are those people up in Milwaukee to do? A good question. Recent sales success of Harley-lookalikes has focused attention there. But now that all of the Big Four have cruisers aimed at that audience, and since H-D itself already has what its loyalists insist is The Real Thing. there isn't much reason to head in that direction.
Sportbikes? Get serious. They're hot right now, but anybody who's been around motorcycles for long knows how fickle the go-fasters are. This year's boom is next year's bust in radical road bikes as much as it is in motocrossers-and that's saying something. And quite apart from the market itself is the formidable task of making a competitive machine. Su zuki GSX-Rs, Honda VFRs and the like don't spring full-grown from in fant engineering staffs, you know. And you don't have to be a Harley hater to admit that it would take H-D a wealth of money and time to come close to those road rockets, let alone pass them, even with the much-ru mored Nova V-Four as the heart of such a machine.
Instead, a shrewd market analyst would look at the other end, where the hormones don't gush so furiously, but where money and the willingness to spend it are found in ever-greater amounts. That's right-with the tour ing people.
1~m~graphers tell us that America is getting older. They also tell us that most of the bucks lie in the vaults of people over 50. Put those two ob servations into the motorcycle micro scope and you find yourself looking at touring. American-style. That's Big Rig Touring, as in monster mo tors propelling half-ton luxobikes at sedate speeds. the two adjustable sad dles occupied by rider and co-rider more interested in the scenery than in the machinery.
These m~torcyc1ists and their world are, I think, the Gold Zone for Harley-Davidson. Not for them the frantic rocketbike-of-the-week syn drome; not for them the fear of own ing a passé piece. They know what they like, and what they like, mostly, is a comfortable, stable mount from which to see the world.
As the Japanese have found, to make those mounts comfortable and stable, engineers have had to feed the engines steroids, until the Big Rigs' powerplants have come to resemble those found in automobiles. We've got flat-Fours, V-Fours, a new inline Four and an old inline-Six, all liquid cooled and tuned to deliver the kind of oomph you usually expect under the hood of an Oldsmobile.
Which brings us back to Harley. Ironically. while American cars are getting smaller, the bikes that tame American distances are getting big ger. Harley's air-cooled V-Twin is quickly becoming the runt of the touring-bike litter, whereas it once was the Kubic King. So. since there apparently is no upper limit to the touring world's thirst for displace ment, and since the development of modern turn-key tourers is, in power and creature comforts, following closely the development of American passenger cars (albeit 50 years later), why not a Harley built around the de finitive American powerplant-the V-Eight?
Yo~i laugh. but in one master stroke, H-D could devastate the com petition. A two-liter, sohc, fuel-in jected, all-American V-Eight driving an automatic transmission would make perfect sense in a motorcycle whose floorboards could easily be ex pected never to come within an inch of pavement. Of course it would be heavy. Of course it would be big. So what? So was the 1959 Cadillac heavy and big, and who cared? Not the people who owned them.
Nonetheless, we Americans under stand V-Eights. We understand their cadences, we understand how to make them and care for them, and we probably always will, despite the cur rent attempt our friends in Detroit are making to convince us that a V Six is a suitable substitute. (It is not.) So it is perfectly fit and proper for the last American motorcycle manufac turer to build a bike with a fit and proøer American engine.
B'esides. think abo'~it the smile on a motorcyclist's face as he beholds a Harley V-Eight. At idle, the rumble of the engine evokes fond memories of the fabled Ford Flathead, ticking over barely fast enough to be heard. On accelerating, the sound becomes throaty and insistent, the drumroll of a meaty MoPar H cmi. And at cruise, the vibes disappear into a faint thrum as the miles click effortlessly by. It's the unmistakable signature of a mo tor born-and raised-in the USA.
An engineer with no sense of all this might well argue that such an en gine for a touring bike is absurd. Probably he'd be right, in the narrow est technical sense. But even touring bikes-or maybe especial/v touring bikes, come to think of it-are devices of sheerest romance, wheeled dreams as much as or more than practical transportation. It must be so, consid ering how much the best and biggest of the full-boat rigs costs today; who would lay out more than ten grand just to get down to the store, or to work? But a ship ofdreams-ah, that's a different matter.
So, too, is there a difference be tween you or I suggesting what Har ley ought to build and Harley itself doing it. We-members of the What They Ought to Do Society-are free of responsibility: we are free of the consequences of betting the com pany on a new venture. Still, the fact remains that both the Society and Harley know that America's appetite for V-Twins is not bottomless.
America's appetite for Harley V Eights might likewise be nonexistent. Or it might be overwhelming. I don't know, any more than anybody else knows. All I do know is that like mil lions of other Americans, I love V Eights, and I'd be a sucker for the first one built to my taste. If it comes from Hamamatsu, well, that's okay, so long as it sings the right V-Eight song. But I'd much prefer its hometown be Milwaukee. -Steven L. Thompson
