Posted September 27, 2005   Email |  Print

Star Motorcycles' new headliner: Roadliner combines classic style, modern features

Story by Grant Parsons
Photos by Riles & Nelson

Give Yamaha credit for this: When they had finished most of the design work for a 2,000cc cruiser and didn't like the results, they ash-canned it and started over with a blank sheet of paper.

What they didn't build was a machine company reps said was a bit top-heavy and perhaps out of proportion. What they wound up with instead was the impressive new flagship for the Star Motorcycle line, the Roadliner.

And for cruiser fans who like their bikes to look good, handle well and ride superlatively (which is pretty much all of us), that's a very good thing.

Hurrah for clean sheets of paper!

The idea for the Roadliner is simple. Build an air-cooled, pushrod V-twin with a single-crankpin motor and belt drive, give it retro styling—and then toss in plenty of modern touches to go with all that retro. And all that comes together very well.

Yes, the engine may be air-cooled (and 1,854cc, to boot), and the valves may be operated by pushrods, but it also sports modern fuel injection and two counterbalancers that work well enough that the engine can be solidly mounted in the frame with no vibes.

It sports four valves per cylinder, dual plugs, direct intake ports and a high (by cruiser standards) compression ratio of 9.5:1. There's even an EXUP valve in the exhaust tract that might seem more at home in a sportbike. In fact, Yamaha has been fitting the EXUP valve, which alters exhaust backpressure to improve low- and mid-range performance, to its sportbikes for years. (On the Roadliner, the valve is upstream of the muffler, so it remains even if you add a custom pipe.)

The motor is mounted in a new-school, eight-piece aluminum frame that's nearly half the weight (37 pounds) of the company's Road Star's frame. The rear swingarm is die-cast aluminum and weighs under 12 pounds.

Then there's the styling, which throws back to the Art Deco movement of the 1920s for inspiration. Think "The Rocketeer'"—and you've got it.

How's it ride? We'll have a full report in the December issue of American Motorcyclist, but after putting more than 250 miles on the bike at the intro in Portland, Oregon, three things stood out.

First, for a bike with a claimed wet weight of 750 pounds, the Roadliner feels quite a bit lighter. Compared to a few other heavyweight cruisers out there, the difference is noticeable.

Yamaha engineers say that's because the center of mass has been kept so low, but for whatever reason, the bike never feels cumbersome. You notice it in parking lots, when you're tipping the bike from side to side, or even backing it out of a parking place.

Second, out on the road, this bike does what you tell it. Unlike some other heavyweights, on which it can feel like the bike is taking you for a ride, or that the mass of the machine is just a trailer behind a vague-steering front wheel, the Roadliner is surprisingly precise by the standards of its class. While it's tough to use the word "nimble" on a bike this large, you can make the machine do exactly what you want, within its performance envelope.

It's certainly easy to achieve the modest lean angles at which the floorboards scrape (and they will scrape; luckily, they also fold), but what leaves a bigger impression is that you can easily change lines in turns. And if your weight is positioned right on a really twisty road, you can actually trail-brake into corners.

Third, the big, single-crankpin mo' manages to achieve two seemingly contradictory goals: It has tons of character yet doesn't vibrate you to death. The power is prodigious right off idle, as you'd expect with a cruiser of this size (also thank the EXUP valve for that) and the torque curve is appropriately flat. Yet the motor doesn't sign off as quickly as you'd expect. Twist the throttle and hold it, and the bike just keeps accelerating up the rev range, long past when other machines may have signed off and required an upshift.

The bike comes in three trim levels, starting with the base model at $13,880, a blacked-out Midnight version and the Roadliner S, with even more chrome. Touring "Stratoliner" versions are also available in the same three basic trim levels and come with saddlebags that actually complement the bike's lines and a lockable, detachable windscreen.

For a full report, see the December issue of American Motorcyclist magazine.

Horizontal lines, pushrods and an EXUP-equipped exhaust dominate the Roadliner's looks.	Every element of the Roadliner shows styling attention, from the fenders to the swingarm.
Stratoliner versions of the Roadliner come fitted with accessories for touring.	The lines of the saddlebags on the Stratoliner sweep into the lines of the bike.

© 2005, American Motorcyclist Association