Written by / Story by Mark Barnett   

Excerpted from Barnett’s Magazine Print Article

With the death of Buell, there is now an opening for a beginner bike in the Harley-Davidson line up, something for first time riders who don’t want to invest in a Sportster. Looking back through Harley’s history, there was a single-cylinder, four-stroke called the Sprint which was quite popular. It was road raced, flat tracked, motocrossed, and ridden off road on trails. Thinking about this bike and looking at the proven top end of the V-Rod, we came up with the group of concept singles shown here.

For the motor, I like the lay-down architecture since it leaves a huge open space between the tank and engine which I believe makes it look less intimidating to beginners. It keeps the center of gravity extremely low which makes it less likely to tip over if the rider’s foot slips a little at a stop sign. It also makes it easy to push, back up, and maneuver out of a garage and driveway. The red and silver cruiser version shown here would have floorboards and an automatic transmission. This would let the person concentrate on watching cars and makes it easy for them to start off and stop, the usual trouble areas when people are learning to manually shift with a clutch for the first time. A 600cc water-cooled, V-Rod cylinder would probably put out about 60 horsepower which would be fast enough for any kind of riding, only down about ten on stock Big Twins. There could be an electronically-limited 33-horsepower mode for the really timid or for wet weather riding. This would be a potent little bike and its success would be mainly dependent upon styling and pricing. You can imagine this bike with a Sportster tank or a Fat Bob. A second, standard version of this single would be the orange and silver one. It would be closer to the Blast and have a six-speed, manually-operated transmission. These two versions would fill the beginner niche for Harley-Davidson quite nicely in my estimation.

    I raced singles for many years, loved them, and know that they are not merely for beginners. Singles are very light and quick. On tight road race courses, they are practically unbeatable. I beat numerous 750cc Suzukis on real road courses through city streets. Singles are also very fuel efficient and easy to work on. The white and red enduro version of the single would be like Yamaha’s XT500 which has been selling for over 25 years in Europe and Japan; it is a good general purpose bike. It would be tall enough for a six-footer to ride and have a full line of accessories like luggage racks, saddlebags, and even a trunk. Many riders end up going to smaller bikes due to the light weight as they age, even for touring. BMW has a very successful 650cc single that they outfit for dirt, street, and touring. If gas shoots up to the moon, I can even imagine a T. Boone Pickens version of this model with a compressed natural gas tank wedged into the open space between the engine and gas tank. That way you could fill up like many buses, with American-produced natural gas and the gasoline tank could be converted to storage space. This enduro could be outfitted as a supermoto, a touring bike, a town bike, or an off-road model. It would be a good, inexpensive bike for all four kinds of riding.

    Finally, I think it would make sense to reach out to the younger, non-cruiser riders with a sport version like the orange/white/black model with the small fairing. This wouldn’t be a 160 mph, four-cylinder road racer, but it would be light, nimble, and unbeatable in real world canyon racing conditions. It would be much cheaper to insure than a four-cylinder repli-racer. I could imagine a singles class of road racing built up around this bike, especially if it had a second connecting rod pushing a lever imitating the weight of a piston set at exactly 90-degrees from the first cylinder. This trick allowed Ducati’s infamous Supermono to rev to the moon, much higher than other singles and dominate single-cylinder road racing for decades in Europe. It fools the engine into thinking it is a 90-degree V-twin with perfect primary balance. It makes the traditionally hard-to-balance single run vibration free.

    That’s it for this episode of imagine-a-bike. Next issue, our touring bikes should be done with any luck at all. That will be followed by some ideas for new cruiser and custom models and then finished off with some oddball ideas; as if my five-cylinder, radial-engine touring bike wasn’t weird enough. Oops, I let that slip.