By Will Powell
Everyone who loves motorbikes should mourn the loss of Buell. One of the great bastions of biking innovation, individuality and originality has gone after its parent company Harley-Davidson halted production in a move that's as depressing as it is astonishing.
Buell is better integrated with Harley than it's been since H-D Incorporated took control in 2003 - there's more crossover between the two firms, more component sharing, more collaboration. Harley closing Buell to focus on its core product puts paid to an often-turbulent six-year partnership that had just started to bear fruit. Not financially but in terms of building great motorcycles, certainly.
No more Buells being built ever matters because, whether you love or hate the bikes, the firm's founder Erik Buell is an innovator. Like Colin Chapman at Lotus, Buell's mission was to create handling nirvana. Those who know Erik say he's utterly obsessed with developing his motorbikes and is constantly coming up with innovative ideas - so unless you like bikes that behave like mentally ill mules, he's a guy you want around.
Years before mass centralisation was a hot topic in the Moto GP paddock, ex-AMA racer Erik was quietly applying the principle to his production motorcycles.
In fact, Buell launched a multi-pronged attack on sloppy handling. Key to their quest for perfect balance was the principle of moving heavy components into centre of the bike (mass centralisation.) Innovations like fuel in the frame, where a bike's aluminium beam frame is used as the fuel tank, and putting oil in the swingarm were classic Buell quirks conceived to aid agility.
Keeping unsprung weight low was another key goal, chased using technology like Zero Torsional Load (ZTL) brakes - essentially huge rim mounted discs with reverse callipers that are lighter at the wheel. Arguments still rage about the gyroscopic effect, but some racers swear by them.
Erik Buell is unconventional, a free thinker. He didn't see why exhaust pipes should run along the side of the bike (he's got a point - they're not aerodynamic, spoil the lines and make the rider hot) so he mounted pipes centrally beneath the bike.
All of these defining Buell principles culminated in the XB12 - arguably the company's finest production bike achievement - and those who spent time riding one might just tell you it redefined their view of how a bike should handle. Buell just built motorbikes in a fundamentally different way to everyone else.
Of course there have been problems. The bikes picked up a reputation for poor reliability and the prices were high, which is why you can't solely blame the accountants at Harley-Davidson Inc for Buell's demise.
The bean counters took one look at an 81 percent black hole in income compared with last year, combined with a 21 percent freefall in year-on-year sales last quarter, and panicked. Frankly, I would have too. We're told the decision to kill-off Buell is a 'long-term escape plan,' but Harley-Davidson's own future seems shaky at best and the sports bike cull seems dangerously short-termist.
At the time of writing, Erik Buell is reportedly in twilight talks to keep his brand going and make it independent again. Sadly, we're not holding our breath. The man himself has already posted a YouTube vid to tell his customers, fans, detractors and the rest of the world, with his bottom lip quivering, that the 27-year old dream is over.
One silver lining is that dealers are selling the last new Buells at chopped down prices - bargain XB12s for £5000 have been reported, with canny customers snapping them up in full knowledge they're buying a future classic. Get one now, if you can, because sad to say they'll likely be the last of the original American sports bikes.
