do Victory motorcycles belong in a magazine devoted to American V-twins? Victory is an American Company that manufactures cruiser-style motorcycles, so one would tend to say “yes.” However, let me point out some of the differences between Victory motorcycles and “Harley-based” V-twins.
Since 1903, Harleys have had the camshaft(s) in a cavity attached to the crankcase, pushrods actuating two valves in each cylinder head, and—just to inject a little nationalism—SAE fasteners. In fact, the whole motorcycle is engineered in inches, not millimeters. Now look at the Victory: there are no pushrods; the camshafts are located in the tops of the cylinder heads; it has four-valve heads; and to play the nationalist card, it’s all metric.
The fact is, all of today’s American V-twin motorcycles are based on the 1936 architecture, which guarantees an ancestral link to Harleys. Not so for the Victory, which has a fresh design more familiar to foreign bikes.
Then there’s the aftermarket. Nothing that is made for Harleys fits a Victory. All of those 800-page catalogs from Drag Specialties, Biker’s Choice, CCI, and others feature gazillions of parts and accessories, none of which fits Victories. Or any foreign bike. In this sense you could argue that in the Harley world a Victory is as foreign as a Kawasaki.
However, the same could be said for Harley-Davidson’s VRSC line. It is a metric bike with overhead cams and multi-valve heads; Big Twin and Sportster accessories don’t fit it; and to top it off, it’s not even air-cooled. Maybe the title of this piece should be “Is V-Rod Ours?”
But in reality the Victory is everything a Harley might have evolved into. It almost happened with the Nova. A purely metric bike, the Nova had four-valve heads, OHC (no pushrods), and nothing in common with Big Twins—hey, sounds more like a Victory than a Harley to me! But for a quirk in timing—Nova came along in the early 1980s when the company was too strapped for cash to pursue it—we might even have a Victory-style bike in Harley’s lineup today.
I think that if we are willing to accept the V-Rod as something a Harley magazine should cover (which I do), then the Victory naturally fits. It also depends on what kind of magazine you want: A single-dimension, narrow-focus magazine? Or one that looks at a bigger picture, which covers motorcycles that fit naturally into the Harley scene? I like the big picture. Victory is ours.
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