Buell RS1200: American hot rod

(Page 4 of 4)

May/June 2006
By Roland Brown 
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Hitting the mark
In its day, all this innovation added up to a very impressive motorcycle, and there was still one more piece of design genius worthy of note: the seat hump. Buell’s latest Ulysses dual-purpose bike has a similar feature, and it was first seen on the RS1200. A youthful Erik Buell, it appears, once wheelied a girl off the back of a bike he was showing-off on, and decided to devise something that would stop this happening in the future.

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The RS’s seat hump achieved its aim brilliantly, swinging up (after a locating pin has been unscrewed) to become a backrest when needed. At the same time it solved the problem of what to do with a normal detachable tailpiece, and also gave permanent storage space for a thin set of raingear or similar. The execution could perhaps have been a little tidier — when folded back down for solo use the hump is a bit ugly — but the concept was undeniably clever.

There’s that word clever again. And if any motorcycle designer deserved the description it was the youthful engineer from Mukwonago, Wis. Back in 1989, Erik Buell and his team of 12 built four bikes a week, the majority of them the RS. His original RR racer had perhaps been more typical of the man: superbly designed and crafted, and ruthlessly single-minded in its search for the holy grail of speed.

But it was with the RS1200 that Buell really hit the mark. The RS1200 was expensive, as any small-volume bike is bound to be. It had a few rough edges, and didn’t sell in great numbers. But the RS was an inspired, superbly professional attempt at building a true Harley-Davidson sports bike. It will long be remembered as the machine that laid the foundations for Buell Motorcycles’ success in subsequent years. MC

 

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