Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/128208
remembered where I was: Switzerland, where there's a speed camera or a traffic cop on every corner, ready to give a ticket for 2km over the limit, let alone 200. Backing off the throttle, I eased the Egli demo-rod back down from orbit and re-entered planet Earth. But if you drive a newmodel Porsche Carrera, you can also afford to pay the speeding tickets: Eventually he caught me up then almost sideswiped me as he leaned over and peered through the passenger window. Then the recognition signals lit up, and he nodded: He'd been V-Maxed! It may seem improbable, but Yamaha's benchmark V-Max musclebike has actually become middleaged and is about to qualify for a pension-book. For, with the recent demise of Honda's long-established C90 step-through, the mantle of Japan's longest-lived bike model in current production has passed from I ittle to large, from economy to excess - now, it's the V-Max which has outstayed all others. Eighteen years after its 1985 launch, Yamaha's legendary maxi-rod is still with us today, cataloged as a 2003 model in dealer showrooms of selected countries around the world to satisfy the reduced but resilient core of customers for a bike which cliche insists has become the two-wheeled equivalent of the 428 Cobra, representing point-and-squirt motorcyc mg par excellence. For muscular looks matched by effortless straight-line performance, the near-vintage V-Max is still The One. It must assuredly also be the single most profitable model Yamaha has ever produced, having repaid its development and tooling costs severa times over in the past two decades - especially considering that its V4 engine was originally developed to power the company's Venture land yacht, until adapted at the behest of Yamaha USA to produce a street dragster to rival Honda's V65 Magna or the Kawasaki 900 Eliminator. Do you remember them? Does anyone? Exactly... But in the two decades in which these models have become yesterday's papers, tens of thousands of V-Maxes have been built and sold around the world - both in the restricted 100-bhp J-market guise in which the bike was belatedly sold in PC performance markets like France (where it still became, and remains, a cult product), and the full-power 140bhp version which became the gray market import of choice for so many European countries in the 1990s. This incorporates the nifty V-Boost intake package missing from the lowpower version, with a servo-operated flap valve in the inlet manifold that allows each cylinder to gulp mixture from two of the four 35mm Mikuni CV carbs above 6000 rpm, as opposed to just a single carb below that figure. Call it passive supercharging. What's more, as the basis for personalizing and prettifying a bike that is surprisingly practical as well as performing, the V-Max reigns supreme. So few of the tens of thousands of examples that have been built through the years remain in unmodified showroom condition that the term "stock V-Max" has become a contradiction in terms. It's the streetrod of choice for cosmetic improvement. One of the ongOing ironies of European motorcycling is that the country that houses the highest proportion of the most way out, most wacky and most wicked-performing cue I e bikes per head of the two-wheeled population is stuffy old Switzerland the place where the Greens are so pervasive that a nosy pedestrian will come and scold you for leaving your engine running while waiting for a red light to change and where social conformity daily militates against any form of behavior more unconventional than skiing to work in winter, yet which nevertheless acts as the spawning ground for two-wheeled exotica only dreamt of elsewhere. Must be the effects of Alpine altitude n e _ S • APRIL 9, 2003 49