Wakan / Avinton - Franco-American Hybrid

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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.

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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.

Horex VR6 - Teutonic Six-Pot Roadster

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The list of six-cylinder motorcycles is, admittedly, a short one. For production machines you have the Benelli Sei, the Honda CBX, the Kawasaki KZ1300, and the current BMW K1600 and Honda Goldwing 1800. For race bikes you have the Honda RC166 and Laverda V6. Six pot bikes are a rare breed, but there has been a new addition to the list, and it comes from a long-defunct German brand that came out of nowhere in 2010 to announce that they would build a six-cylinder roadster with an engine design unlike anything else on two wheels.

Read the rest of the Horex VR6 story on Silodrome.com

Voxan - Café (Racer) Français

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When you think of big sporting V-twins and café-styled roadsters, what do you picture? Italy and Great Britain maybe - well-groomed Latin men astride thundering sports machines or perhaps greasy-haired rockers congregating outside a bar.

It’s unlikely you’d imagine Issoire, a quaint town filled with medieval architecture situated in the heart of France.