There is a certain brutish elegance to the act of cramming an impossibly huge engine into a tiny chassis. American designers in particular seem to have an affinity for stuffing air-cooled big twins of the Harley Davidson variety into sporting machines. There is something appealing about the incongruence of seeing a shuddering, massively torquey engine with its acres of gleaming billet and chrome overwhelming the appearance of an otherwise lithe machine. While not common, you do have a few choices if you desire a Big McLargehuge motor in a bike with sporting pretensions. Buell and
Ecosse catered to the (admittedly limited) air-cooled-Harley-style-45-degree-twin-in-a-sport-slash-muscle-bike market, while
Roehr tried to build a supercharged superbike around a V-Rod engine. If you desired something more inspired that wasn’t a cookie-cutter custom or generic café-styled machine, there was always
Confederate. The only notable entrant from overseas was Yamaha, who got into the game with their weird but remarkably tame Warrior-powered MT-01.
So it only makes sense that a French company would champion the cause of big American cruiser power in a sporty machine while citing Carroll Shelby as a major influence. That would be the plot synopsis of Wakan/Avinton, the oddball muscle-sport-bike that has been produced off-and-on in France since the mid-2000s.
