INSIDE PASS
Buellogy
Author: K3 Chris Onwiler
Saying goodbye to America’s sportbike company
.jpg?n=5106 "Erik Buell will no longer be building motorcycles that bear his name") Buell is no more. On October 15, an absolutely heartbreaking video was posted to the company’s web site. It showed a pale, distraught Erik Buell announcing the demise of his company and his dream. With new motorcycle sales down more than seventy percent industry-wide, parent company, Harley Davidson, is circling its wagons and cutting its losses in an effort to survive the economic downturn. Along with the demise of Buell, Harley announced that it will be putting MV Agusta up for sale as well.
The Buell Motorcycle Company began with Erik and his friend Henry Duga building one-off racing machines from scratch in a shed no bigger than a three car garage. That’s been done before but the difference here was Erik Buell’s ability to think outside of the box. Actually, he began by thinking outside the airbox. Buell’s fuel-in-frame design came about because he needed all of the area above his engine to accommodate an airbox large enough to give him the cylinder filling required for maximum power. This ruled out a tank in the usual spot. Traditionally, when faced with this same dilemma, engineers from other companies had either compromised the airbox size or lengthened the wheelbase to squeeze in a gas tank elsewhere. Erik saw a way to make one component do two jobs. It was this sort of brilliance which propelled Buell’s slow but steady climb towards his dream of being a mainstream motorcycle manufacturer. Achieving such a goal was seemingly outlandish, ridiculous and utterly impossible in the corporate world of the day but that didn’t faze Erik. For him, failure was never an option. Buell was able to swing a deal that supplied his company with Harley Davidson Sportster engines and he began designing and producing sportbikes around them. To put it politely, Sportster motors aren’t especially sporty, so it was bloody amazing and a tribute to Erik’s genius that his creations worked so well. Even better, people bought them. Buell had proven that there was a niche market of riders who wanted to buy American yet weren’t interested in some big, lumbering cruiser. Harley Davidson took notice and acquired Buell’s company, keeping him as the CEO. The American sportbike company had hit the big time.
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