Harley-Davidson is harking back to the 1940s with its new Softail Cross Bones, but this time it adds top-class engineering to the vintage design, writes Geoff Hill.
OTHER THAN the guys who have spent years restoring a genuine 1949 Harley panhead, everyone else will be delighted with the new Harley Cross Bones. Without hours of dedicated labour, we can simply swing our leg over it and ride off down the road with a big grin on our faces. Only to run straight into the back of the bus in front because we've been so busy admiring the way the springs on the girder forks bounce up and down.
As all Harley fans know, any Harley that looked like this in the 1940s would have been a hard tail, ridden only by a real man.
Very cleverly, though, the backroom boys at Milwaukee have come up with a swingarm section and hidden shocks that honour the lines of a vintage rigid frame, but mean you don't need to go straight to casualty at the end of a long day in the saddle.
On the outside, top marks to Harley for getting the vintage look just right, with a gloss black front end counterpointed perfectly with those chrome springs, black bucket headlamp and black mini ape-hanger style handlebars which look great, but unlike their full-size cousins won't have gangrene setting in five miles down the road.
Add the sprung solo seat, gloss black round air cleaner cover, old-style half-round rider footboards, horseshoe-shaped oil tank with the Harley-Davidson patent badge below the seat and five-gallon fuel tank with a new speedo face, and you've got a stunner of a bike.
Which left the only question this: did it ride as good as it looked?
"Best bike I've ever ridden," said Ross at the dealers, handing me the keys. "Bar none."
So why, I wondered as I headed down the motorway, was I feeling like I was hanging on for grim death and just about to slide off a seat that must have been designed for an anorexic jockey?
Ah, a quick glance down at the speedo confirmed why. Those big V-twins can wind up some speed without you really realising.
At more sensible speeds, the Cross Bones is so comfortable you could ride it all day, enjoying the simple pleasures of life like the blatter of sound washing back off the walls as you ride through a tunnel and a sweet clutch married to a gearbox which is every bit as hefty as Harleys of old, but hugely better engineered.
And, best of all, cornering. This is a bike that loves to lean, to the extent that by the end of the day I, the worst cornerer in the world, had not only worn the footboards away, but the soles of my boots.
Every Harley comes with a fantasy, and with the Cross Bones, you're a midwestern soldier just back from the war and you've spent your demob pay on the bike that's going to take you all the way to California to forge in the crucible of destiny the sword of your future.
Oh, and to have a few beers with a few girls down on the beach. Hell, you can almost smell the suntan lotion and the salt sea air already.
You may have no soles on your boots, but you're sitting on the sweetest motorcycle that ever came out of Milwaukee and you've got a smile on your face as wide as Fifth Avenue.
Right at this moment, that's all that matters in the whole darned world.