F124 Hellcat

F124 HELLCAT

The Confederate you can actually buy-provided you're carrying $60 large in your wallet

Looking for an entertaining and relaxing way to unwind after a long day at the office, say, demolishing buildings with high-explosives?

Let us introduce you, then, to the Confederate F124 Hellcat, $60,000 worth of handmade American musclebike. The F124, despite being a new design, upholds the traditional Confederate experience, which is a little like riding dynamite. It’s loud, very powerful, short for an American-style custom at 62 inches of wheelbase, and not long on creature comforts. There isn’t, for example, any padding on the carbon-fiber seat pan. As a result, vibration from the giant 124-inch, 130-horsepower, S&S-built Evo-style motor comes through loud and clear, via your, umm, fundament, and through your feet and hands. You know you’re riding a beast, of this there is no question.

A cool design riff is running the exhausts through the swingarm, feeding it at the right-side pivot with an Inconel (super-highquality nickel alloy) flexible coupling. This just adds to the sensory overload, as the arc of the swingarm points the twin outlets down at the pavement so the staccato bursts of exhaust noise tend to reflect off the earth and envelope you, despite the removable baffles.

The element that allows the F124 to be as compact as it is, even with the customarily long non-unit Evo power, is the use of Confederate’s own proprietary five-speed transmission, with shafts arranged in such a way as to lop inches off powertrain length.

The rest of the components are all top-shelf stuff. The fork is an inverted 50mm Marzocchi unit fitted with ISR monoblock six piston radial-mount calipers working on 300mm discs. Twin Penske shocks-mounted under the seat-hold up the rear, power transmitted via right-side chain drive to an 18-inch-diameter, 240mm-wide rear tire. It steers remarkably well for a bike with such a wide rear meat. A trio of stacked ovoid PIAA lights illuminate your path, which no doubt will be cleared by the sound that announces your imminent arrival.

What bodywork there is comes in some very fine-looking carbon-fiber, and makes up part of a silhouette that is reminiscent of nothing else on the market.

It’s true that not everyone wants a loud, explosively fast, basically uncomfortable statement of brash American muscle that costs $60K. Which, Confederate will tell you, is exactly the point.

Mark Hoyer