ty well and is surprisingly fast). But
you won't want to rev out the VTX all
the time anyway. Why bother when
it's so much fun to shift the VTX early,
grab a handful of throttle and let the
super-torquey engine do its thing?
You can almost hear the back tire trying to grip the road with each power
pulse of the cylinders. Too bad the
VTX doesn't have .a tachometer; just
so you can see for yourself how little
rpm the motor is turning while delivering so much torque. (Honda claims
the VTX produces 120 Ib./ft. of torque
at 3500 rpm.) Oh well, you'll just
have to feel it.
One really nice feature of the VTX
is that it actually accelerates quite
weIJ at speed. Most big V-twin cruisers that we've ridden don't do this
very well. On the VTX, you can be
rolling down the freeway at 70 mph
and it'll still surge forward rapidly
when you twist the throttle a little
more.
The VTX also doesn't care if the
road starts climbing and it will still
accelerate out of the turns nicely even if you're carrying a passenger.
Our VTX test bike ran cleanly,
though it would sometimes stumble a
little bit when leaving an intersection
while cold. Once the engine warms
up, though, the problem goes away.
system, which, if anything, smoothes
out the VTX's ride and increases reliability. Not a bad second choice,
really.
No matter how hard Honda tried to
keep the VTX down in size, it's still a
huge motorcycle. Luckily, the low
seat height and wide handlebars keep
everything as manageable and controllable as possible. The wide
engine, however, results in poor cornering clearance, so when Honda
refers to the VTX as being a "performance" custom, they
pretty much mean
straight-line performance. (And that it is.)
t.-
Iy four inches up front, you can't
expect a cushy ride. At least the seat
is relatively soft and absorbs some of
the punishment.
The VTX's instrumentation is typically simple for a cruiser. Thankfully,
Honda chose to mount the mostused readout, the speedometer, up
on the han
