In 2002 a sports bike was unveiled. It broke from tradition by using some very radical thinking in its design, pushing the boundaries of two-wheeled engineering and being a far cry from what most believed the sports bike blueprint was. Who was behind the bike? It was Harley-Davidson, that most traditional and conservative purveyor of classic American motorcycles. Well, technically it was a man named Erik Buell, but the company bankrolling and selling the bike was the iconic manufacturer which was Harley. Who would have thought that would happen? As it turned out, the Buell XB9R Firebolt was just one in a series of sporty bikes built by Buell under Harley’s ownership, and the beginning of the end of a rollercoaster relationship between Buell and Harley, which proved to be one of the most remarkable allegiances of the early 2000s...

Having initially convinced Harley to lend him some engines to go racing with in the 1980s, Buell Motorcycles was incorporated into Harley-Davidson in the 1990s as the company’s ‘sports bike arm’ with creator Erik at the helm. Harley-Davidson tasked Buell with creating a sporty model to appeal to younger riders, however with the financial backing he could only have dreamt of before, Erik went far beyond this brief. Perhaps too far for the majority of riders…

Something of a creative genius when it came to motorcycle design (and not a bad guitar player to boot), Erik’s first creations were fairly conventional naked bikes using his own tubular steel frame to house a tuned-up air-cooled Harley-Davidson Sportster engine. While these machines got the Buell name into the public consciousness, in truth they were fairly unreliable and not particularly sporty. A racer at heart, Erik was determined to show the true potential of an air-cooled V-twin, so he set about designing a radical sportsbike, which he called the Firebolt.

With no one to tell him what he could and couldn’t do, Erik pushed the technological boat out. Not only did the Firebolt come with a frame that doubled up as a fuel tank, leaving space for a big airbox, the engine’s oil was located in the swingarm, the exhaust was under-slung and the single front brake disc was rim-mounted. With Harley’s strong tradition for ‘old school’ technology, few imagined anything this futuristic would ever appear from the Milwaukee company and it took the world by surprise. But, best of all, it worked! Just not very reliably...

The ‘multifunctional aluminium frame’ came with an obscenely steep head angle of 21-degrees while the wheelbase was just 1320mm. For comparison, a Yamaha YZF-R1 from the same era ran a 24-degree steering angle and had a wheelbase of 1395mm. The Firebolt’s figures were the kind you would expect to find on a 250GP racer, not a road bike, yet due to the very low centre of gravity created by the unconventional location of the bike’s fluids the Buell was agile without being unstable. Add to this the unique benefits of the huge 370mm ZTL (Zero Torsion Load) rim-mounted disc, which allowed the front wheel to be incredibly light as the braking forces weren’t transferred through the spokes, and high quality suspension, and the Buell was a revelation. Light, at just 189kg wet, and extremely nimble due to its aggressive geometry, the Buell was incredibly impressive in bends and its chassis was a genuine surprise to all who rode it. Unfortunately the same couldn’t be said for the V-twin motor, which is where the Buell story started to unravel.

Big, heavy and with a shockingly clunky gearbox, the 984cc V-twin (which was unique to Buell but ultimately a modified Sportster unit at heart) was the Firebolt’s Achilles’ Heel. This was an engine that didn’t want to be rushed and wasn’t capable of matching the chassis’ sporting prowess, ultimately leaving riders frustrated and wanting more. And then the technical gremlins started to appear…

Owners quickly discovered that the Firebolt had a tendency to snap drive belts with annoying regularity. Eventually this was traced back to the Buell’s lack of a variable belt tensioner (aftermarket companies soon stepped in to offer one), Buell’s design of tensioner also put excessive strain on wheel bearings. Add to this gearbox issues, a dodgy oil pump drive gear, weak front engine mounts and the list goes on and on. Not that it deterred Erik.

A year after the Firebolt, Buell launched the naked Lightning model using the same platform, and then expanded both versions in capacity to create the XB12 range. Soon afterwards there was the Ulysses adventure bike (which was very poorly received and cruelly dubbed the ‘Useless’) and a variety of ‘big frame’ models with extended fuel ranges, alongside an oddball flat tracker and other quirky variants all based on the XB platform. And it didn’t stop there, in 2008 Buell released its 1125R, which was powered by an all-new water-cooled V-twin (built by Rotax) and then the 1125CR naked bike, both of which followed the XB models’ radical design cues. But despite all this effort, reliability issues and a lack of development saw global sales poor and by the late 2000s Buell’s marriage to Harley was on the rocks. The financial crisis hit and Harley closed the doors on Buell Motorcycles in October 2009, leaving Erik to record an emotional video of thanks to his many fans all over the world.

Say what you like about Erik’s bikes, you simply can’t help but salute his radical thinking. The XB9R Firebolt may not have changed motorcycling but it remains a truly unique bike with bags of charm to this day. And as for Erik, he is still designing bikes, this time powered by electricity, with his new company Fuell. Presumably he’s still playing the guitar as well...

Specs:

Engine: 984cc, air-cooled, 4v, push-rod V-twin

Power: 92bhp @ 7500rpm

Torque: 97Nm @ 5500rpm

Seat height: 775mm

Weight: 175kg (dry)