Polaris Victory V92c
Polaris Victory V92C
CW RIDING IMPRESSION
Winning cruiser combination: function with flair
"CRUISERS WERE EXTREMELY LACKING,” explains Matt Parks, head of the Polaris Victory project, about the rival machines he and his staff examined. “They went well in a straight line and that was about it. We kept asking ourselves, ‘Why can’t they do more?'" It was that question that led Parks and the other members of the Victory team to come up with the V92C, a machine that marches to a uniquely functional cruiser beat.
Settle your behind on the 28-inchhigh seat, and you can plant both feet flat on the ground. Grip the wide, pullback handlebar, wiggle the bike from side to side, and the V92C feels unintimidating and not at all ungainly-certainly lighter than its 600-pound claimed weight. Attribute this to its narrow, low-slung engine and correspondingly low center of gravity. Also credit that skinny engine for floorboards that tuck in tighter than on any
Harley-Davidson, yet still mount far enough forward to place your legs in a comfortable stretch. The handlebar leans you back slightly, and gives you a good look at the integrated dial, with its big speedometer and little tach, that nestles in the chrome headlight nacelle.
Push the starter button on the controls that recall the blocky items Harley used to use, and the fuel-injected VTwin starts readily, falling into a smooth, non-loping, 1000-rpm idle without any need for a choke lever. A blip of the throttle sends the revs up with a subdued yet deep-throated bark, far more satisfying than the sibilant hiss of some recent stock-pipe Harleys. Acceleration also promises to set new V-cruiser standards, and in a very civilized way. The 1507cc Victory Twin pulls smooth and hard from idle. You can lug it down to 1200 rpm in top gear, roll the throttle on, and the V92C chugs ahead with no more complaint
than some rattling from the compensator in the primary drive, working hard to take the edges off big torque pulses. Rev it out in the lower gears, and the torque curve is so smooth (Polaris claims 65 foot-pounds at the countershaft at 1200 rpm, rising to over 80 ft.-lbs. at 3200 rpm, and 75 peak horsepower at 5700 rpm) that the bike initially doesn’t feel that fast. But as the tach needle swings quickly past 4000 rpm and the bike pulls harder and harder, you begin to get the idea that this is one fast cruiser. Only the six-cylinder Honda Valkyrie is likely to be much quicker. At low speeds, you can feel the torque pulses from the over-750cc cylinders, and there’s the occasional buzz through the gas tank, but the geardriven counterbalancer has reduced vibration to an unobjectional level.
Perhaps the quality for which the Victory design team is most proud is the V92C’s handling. The solidmounted engine, stiff frame and big, 45mm fork tubes make for a solid structure-claimed to be three times stiffer than some competing cruisersand contribute to an equally solid feel. Crank an aggressive steering input into the Polaris, and it heels over now, with no chassis windup and no wiggling. The bike stays stable while steering effort remains relatively light, a confidence-building combination. Press on that confidence, and the V92C will eventually run out of ground clearance, but at a greater lean angle than on almost any other cruiser. Yet the 63inch wheelbase and reasonable suspension travel mean that even when hard parts begin hitting the ground, the effect is benign: a bit of metal grinding without upsetting the motorcycle.
Of course, the machine we sampled was still a fairly early prototype, with a number of differences from production specification-which won’t be fully locked down for another six months or so. As such, it still exhibited a few behaviors that are in the process of being tamed. Some, such as the miscalibrated fuel gauge and the interference jerking the electronic speedometer around, are minor and easy to correct. Others, such as the tendency for the generally light-and-smooth-shifting transmission to pop into neutral during a second-to-first downshift, will take more work.
But these types of problems always are part of the development process, and Polaris has no plans to release the V92C to the public until solutions are found. If all goes well, the first Victory motorcycles will reach dealerships next spring as early-release 1999 models. For the first year, only 2000 or so V92Cs-priced somewhere in the vicinity of $ 13,000-will be offered. The impressive thing about the Victory prototype isn’t how few glitches it displays, but how quick, civilized and functional it is already, and how serious Polaris is about the motorcycle market in general. The Victory name, after all, wasn’t just chosen to remind you of a certain engine configuration.
Steve Anderson
