Kawasaki started it with the Mean Streak. Then Harley Davidson came up with its radical V-Rod. We're talking about power cruisers here, custom styled bikes with real-world suspension, real brakes and, most of all, real power.
In between, without much fanfare, came Yamaha's entry in this new genre, the Road Warrior: long, low and very black and in some important respects more conventional than either of the others.
It has an air-cooled 48° V-twin with both con-rods on the same crank pin and pushrod-operated valves with hydraulic lifters but it's fuel-injected, digitally ignited and packs as least as much punch as its competitors in a chassis that owes as much to the R1 as it does to the Virago boulevard bolides.
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The motor is derived from the 1602cc Road Star mill, a slow-revving, undersquare but hugely torquey V-twin. For the Warrior it's been bored out from 95 to 97mm, though the stroke remains unchanged at 113mm. That makes it a cavernous 1670cc, the biggest twin yet tested by IOL.
The Road Warrior accelerates incredibly hard through the gears. The quad-valve cylinder heads are also new, two- instead of three-piece units, with more finning and twin spark plugs for cleaner combustion. The light, forged pistons are safe to 5800rpm although peak power is delivered at 5000, while maximum torque, a road-rippling 135Nm, comes up at just 2250.
The bike shovels out 57kW, measured at the back wheel (for reasons best known to itself, Yamaha won't quote horsepower figures on any of its cruisers), which sounds low, but its muscular spread of torque is enough to make it a real handful. The Road Warrior is anything but slow-revving; it accelerates incredibly hard through the gears and you really need to keep one eye on the weird liquid-crystal rev-counter to avoid running it deep into the red zone.
The Stoplight Grand Prix is this monster's natural habitat.
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