Struck By Lightning

STRUCK BY LIGHTNING

ROUNDUP

HANK GOODNESS MOTO insanity is a fully cross-cultural disease. It means that idealistic and inventive stateside maniacs like Erik Buell get to make their start building strange sportbikes in their garages using big, air-cooled American engines, and then get hired into the Bigs by none other than Harley-Davidson for mass production. And that an equally mad Frenchman named Ludovic Lazareth, working half a world away, gets to take the product of Buell’s innovative mind a step farther. Several steps, actually.

You have seen Lazareth’s work before. The 38-year-old has a long history of building wickedly cool customs, mostly using Japanese machinery, and he seems to have a penchant for the Yamaha V-Max. In fact, one version of his work on one of the Tuning Fork Folks’ most legendary bikes led off our “Max Vees” feature (January, 2002).

But this particular step onto the wild side began with a Buell XB12S Lightning.

Working with the XB series presented some new problems. Foremost being that the frame is the fuel tank and the swingarm is the oil tank. Popping open a parts catalog to pilfer a Ducati or Triumph component is out. So, he fabricated the single-sided rear arm largely from scratch, heavily reshaping the right side and keeping the upper brace. The hub retains the stock belt drive in a beefed-up axle carrier. The big trick is rear arm remains the oil tank.

Why cut the frame? Because it was the only way to get the 1.6-inch drive belt from the crankshaft to the Mini Cooper S blower mounted atop the air-cooled Twin! Low-compression pistons are fitted, with special fuel-injectors and a one-off air filter to clean the incoming charge.

It all exhales through custom exhaust headers and an underengine muffler. Power is a claimed 140 hp.

The single-sided front suspension is a Lazareth original, with damping in the large central strut. So in addition to the chopped-frame for the blower drive belt, the steering head is also heavily modified to accept the trick front end. Wheels are ex-Speed Triple rears, a common move for the Frenchman. The front is narrowed to the standard 3.5-inch width to take a sporting front tire, while the rear is sectioned and widened to 8 inches and runs a 21 Omm Metzeier. In a nod to Buell, the six-piston front caliper grips a Lazareth rim brake.

Bodywork is bare-bones minimal, with a splash of carbon-fiber here and there. Cat-eye headlights started as Honda CBR units but sport blue LEDs with custom covers, while the taillights, incorporated into the rear corners of the seat, blaze in red. Just a few billet bits complete the look, with tiny bullet-shaped

bar-end mirrors fitted in the spirit of the law, if not to the letter of it, while tidy footpeg hangers bolt to the main frame spars.

Erik Buell himself saw the bike at the Paris show last year, said it was cool to see one of his machines tuned like this, and that he appreciated Lazareth’s touch on an American bike. The Frenchman’s very selection of the machine as a starting point is a mark of respect. Makes sense that a pair of free-thinkers who like to play with the two-wheel form would admire each other’s work.

Lazareth Design does a tremendous amount of customizing on two wheels and four, and in the case of the blown Buell, it was built for an upcoming French film. Could it be Last Burnout in Paris? -Mark Hoyer