Flat, hard, clean seat, no tail rubbish, pillion
just possible. Then a chrome molybdenum
trellis frame, housing a bronzed, clean, finless
engine behind a wide, obvious, and damn-
you-I-work-brilliantly-so-get-over-it-and-learn-
to-love-the-look radiator. No great Husqvarna
decal anywhere, except subtly black on the
black anodised muffler. Futuristic? Yes, it
looked like one of those Pinterest pages that
delivers bikes of the future prototypes that will
never work, or that ride with all the grace and
ability of a boat-jetty.
Adjustable forks, nice, very nice, but a 700cc
single? I don’t think so…
Prejudice, prejudice, prejudice.
“It’s pretty, yeah but it”ll be all mouth and no
trousers”, I thought to myself. So we had a cup
of tea and talked about bikes.
Later, I realised I was due on the radio,
in town, in an hour, and I had to pick up
someone on the way, in usual Friday night
traffic, and the show is live, so lateness is OUT.
I don my kit and head out to the 701.
Bloody hell, it’s just gorgeous; glowing in
the evening light, like industrial sculpture. It
radiates with wonderful recognisable ‘scando’
design chic, and cool.
A café racer meets Tron. Wow. WOW.
Fire it up. First surprise... it revs like a nutter.
Into first, wave,‘see you tomorrow’, stall it.
Okay it needs a handful. Oh. Dear. Lord.
The first corner, I fell in before I thought
about it, and the trajectory of that process
equates to Euclidean mathematical accuracy.
The next twenty minutes were some of the
most fun I ever had. I read somewhere that
this was designed to operate at ‘synaptic’
level. I immediately understood what Husky
means. It goes where you think, with a serious
growling scream and gristly swiftness. Yes,
the bike is light, at 157kg, and feels even more
weightless than that. It threw every prejudice I
had completely out the window. I knew that a
single will always vibrate, have some minimal
low torque, won’t rev very high, will suffer
from slack power output, will sound like a BSA
Bantam, and will run out of power, speed, and
grip, just when you need it most. All 100 per
cent wrong. 200 per cent wrong. Not only does
it deliver the opposite of my erroneous beliefs,
it doubled what I thought was even possible,
and now I cannot stay off this bike.
KIWI RIDER 49