BY ALAN CATHCART
Husaberg breaks new ground
The upright-cylinder / steel-backboneframe architecture of off-road-motorcycle design has remained unchanged
for some decades, with only Honda's
CR250 aluminum chassis charting an
alterna tive route - in terms of ma terials,
at least.
But now, Sweden's small but prestigious Husa berg factory - reigning
World champions in both 500cc Open
MX and four-stroke Enduro classes - is
on course to change all that, with au allnew four-stroke motorcycle now taking
shape in prototype form in the company's Rofors factory, which may establish
a watershed in off-road design for others to follow.
The brainchild of Husaberg's chief
engineer Thomas Gustavsson, who
already had its layout sketched out on
paper at the time of the firm's takeover
by KTM four years ago, the new Husaberg will initially be built in both 400cc
and 250cc enduro guise, in which form
it would have been a strong contender
for honors in the new 250cc four-stroke
enduro class introduced this year.
But though the Swedish factory had
planned to debut the new bike in the
1999 World Enduro series, it's understood that a brake has since been put on
development, so tha t it won't now
appear in action until the year 2000.
Apparently, this is a decision handed
down by Husaberg's owners, KTM,
because the Austrian firm's management feared the radical new motorcycle
built by its small-volume subsidiary
(1998 Husaberg production did not
exceed 1500 bikes, compared to KTM's
own 26,000-plus) would deflect attention from its own new four-stroke range
scheduled to debut this year, which
while sure to be finely engineered - is
much more conservative than the radical new Husaberg enduro.
While retaining the same overall single-cam, four-valve layout as the existing models, Gustavsson's new engine
design sees the traditional vertical cylinder now slanted to the rear and has the
cylinder head rotated so that the inta)
