Vance & Hines Hot Rod Gs

VANCE & HINES HOT ROD GS

If Carroll Shelby built cool bikes instead of hot cars, this would be it

CAMRON E. BUSSARD

FOR OUR MONEY, IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKE A motorcycle too good. In fact, almost anyone can find ways to make a streetbike better, no matter how technologically sound it may be from the factory. Touring riders add plush seats, beefed-up suspensions, high-mileage tires and so many lights that their bikes sometimes look like scale models of Las Vegas casinos. V-Twin riders make their bikes better with engine hop-up parts, free-breathing exhaust pipes and as many gold-en-crusted eagle medallions as will fit.

Sport riders, however, have a much harder job. because their bikes are so good, it almost takes someone with the skills of an Eddie Lawson to push them to their full potential. Sportbikes come nearly ready for battle on the track, so they have about as much horsepower as the street rider could ask for, and they have handling limits that most street riders will seldom explore. When it comes to horsepower and handling, sportbikes are about as good as it gets. But, if there is a down side to all this competence, it has to be sportbikes’ upwardly spiraling prices.

It’s those stiff prices that make a machine like the new Suzuki GS500 an appealing motorcycle. The GS is a sporty, simply styled, lightweight. 487cc parallel-Twin that sells for under $3000. Part of the reason for the low price is that the GS uses a “low-tech” air-cooled engine that has been around for years in various guises. Furthermore. the bike doesn’t come with a fairing, and it doesn’t come with arm-stretching horsepower, so it won't do 160 miles an hour unless you kick it out of the Space Shuttle's cargo door.

The GS500 will, however, ferry riders around town gently enough to please even the most cautious of mothers, yet it handles precisely enough to ricochet up and down backroads like a cat with a bad attitude. It is in many ways a reincarnation of a mid-Seventies standard motorcycle, although one that has had its chassis and styling recalibrated for the sporting predilection of the late-Eighties.

And that's where Terry Vance and the bike you see here, the Vance & Hines GS500, come in. In the GS500. Vance saw a good bike that could be made better. And while his company is noted for its complete line of exhaust pipes and other hop-up accessories, it's clear that Vance's affection for the new Suzuki goes beyond the potential sales of the parts he has designed for his GS kits. In fact, his attraction reaches back to his roots in motorcycling. “My father bought one of the first Honda CB750s,” says Vance, “and I bought it from him. Before I knew it. I was putting on shocks and building the engine. 1 just kept adding to it.” That’s not far from the approach Vance took when starting to think of ways to make the stock GS a more-stylish, more-comfortable and more-powerful motorcycle.

Vance believes that the GS500 is in many ways an attempt by the Japanese to tap into their early success in America. “This bike,” he says, “takes us back to the beginnings of the sport, back to where you could buy a standard motorcycle. You didn't have to buy a high-performance machine and you didn't have to pay the extra money for a fairing that you didn’t want. Now the challenge is to find a way to make it cool again to ride something other than the fastest and quickest motorcycle you can get.”

With his version of the GS, Vance has built a bike that is a lot like some late-model, Carroll Shelby-modified automobiles, which are basically hopped-up versions of standard or economy cars.

Unfortunately, you can’t walk into a Suzuki dealership and order the Vance & Hines bike in the way that you can buy a Shelby Dodge automobile. The bike has to be assembled from the parts. Nonetheless, Vance is quick to explain the rationale behind the GS by connecting it to the car world. “It’s cool to drive a Volkswagen convertible,” Vance explains, “and we need a Volkswagen convertible type of motorcycle. One that’s cool for how it looks, as well as for how it performs.”

Because of his belief that the styling had to be spot on, Vance first of all cleaned up the basic lines of the GS. He felt that the overall look was right, but he wanted a flashier package. He says, “A guy has to feel like he is riding something neat, or he is not going to get on the thing.” The first assignment was to chop off about six inches from the rear fender and to shorten the turnsignal stalks. These small changes dramatically tightened up the rear of the GS.

Next, Vance pulled the standard graphics off the side panels and designed his own. Several color combinations of the new, stick-on graphics will be available. Next, the stock, white wheels were taken off and powder-coated red. The final styling change was to polish the edges of some of the cylinders’ cooling fins to “lighten up” the engine.

Those modifications alone change the GS considerably, but more significant alterations were in order. The triedand-true stock engine produces under 40 horsepower, with a top-weighted powerband. So the goal for the performance modifications was simple: Increase lowand midrange power. “We wanted the bike to feel as strong as possible right off the bottom,” says Vance, “so you wouldn’t have to wind it to get usable power.”

The first step in that process was to bump up the displacement from 487cc to 555cc. Boring the cylinders from 74mm to 78mm gave the increase in displacement, and new, Wiseco pistons filled the larger bores. With the larger displacement, the bike begged for a less-restrictive exhaust system. The final 2-into-l arrangement is louder than stock, but the exhaust note is so deep, throaty and soulful, the increase in noise isn’t a bother.

With the exhaust system bolted on, the carburetors needed to be recalibrated, as well. A change in the needle taper and some minor rejetting resulted in spot-on carburetion. Then, Vance installed a performance clutch kit to better handle the increase in power. The final performance item was an ignition advancer. Altogether, Vance estimates that the engine mods added 10 percent to both the horsepower and torque figures of the stock GS500.

There was little Vance needed to do to the chassis, because the standard GS is a great-handling lightweight motorcycle. He did, however, stiffen up the front fork, add steel-braided brake lines and mount Dunlop K591 tires front and rear. The last change to the bike was to make one-inch-taller handlebar risers.

With those changes, the GS becomes a different motorcycle. From the get-go, it sounds better, and the larger pistons send more-authoritative thumps up through the chassis to the tank between the rider’s knees. The carburetion is right on, and from just above idle, the kitted GS pulls considerably harder than the stock bike. The stocker has to be revved fairly high to reach its horsepower; the Vance bike is a stump-puller by comparison.

Those impressions are backed up by the improved quarter-mile times and top speeds of the Vance bike. Cycle Worlds test GS trotted through the quarter in 13.39 seconds at 98 miles an hour, whereas the Vance & Hines bike stepped into the 12s, with a 12.86-second run at 102 miles an hour. Top speed was up from 118 to 121 miles an hour. Finally, the time from 0 to 60 miles an hour was improved from 4.6 seconds to 4 seconds flat.

Then, too, the stiffer front fork improves the handling over the stock bike. Before, the weight of the GS alone would soak up a couple of inches of fork travel, giving the bike a slightly unbalanced feel. Certainly, the Dunlop tires contribute to the better handling, even though the 120/70 front tire may be just a little too large, imparting a sluggish feel at low speeds. The handlebar risers make the machine more comfortable, allowing the rider to sit in a more-upright position than with the lower, stock bars.

The cost for the parts to make the bike you see here comes to just over $1200. Vance figures that there are about eight hours of shop time in building this bike, which would add about $400 to the price of the machine, for a total of approximately $4600, about the cost of a stock 400cc Honda CB-Í Four. That’s expensive, especially when you consider that Kawasaki’s EX500, a liquidcooled, 500cc Twin with roughly equivalent performance to the kitted GS, costs $3350. Even leaving off the upgraded tires, brake lines and repainted wheels, the Vance & Hines GS will cost $4200, $850 more than the EX. But Vance expects that many GS owners who want to improve their bikes will do most of the work themselves, saving the shop costs. Other than the engine work, most of the modifications are of the bolt-on variety.

And that's the real beauty of the Vance bike. The customer doesn’t have to buy the whole kit, but can add whatever he wants to his stock GS: just the handlebar risers or the graphics kit or the exhaust pipe, or the whole shebang. In other words, he can pick and choose what options he wants, or he can build the complete bike at his own pace.

All in all, the Vance & Hines GS500 makes a lot of sense. The stock Suzuki has an Eighties chassis with a Seventies engine, and the Vance modifications bring the engine power up to date. Still, Vance admits he is not going to get rich building GS500 hop-up parts. “But,” he says, “I think the bike shows the direction the industry has to go in the future. It’s back to the beginning.”

That may be so, but as good as the Vance bike is, it reveals a missed opportunity, as well, one we think a manufacturer should capitalize on. When you buy a car, you can order any number of options, and a few weeks later, pick it up at your dealer. Having that choice available at the dealer level makes a lot of sense for motorcycles as well. And bikes like the Vance & Hines GS make that sensibility more clear than ever before. E3