Harley Davidson VROD (2002)

The first time I spotted one of these I knew I had to have one.

They look absolutely fantastic with the aluminium and chrome finish.

Got it in 2005 and sold 2008.

With an engine designed by Porsche putting out 125bhp on a cruiser with a seat height around 700mm, forward foot controls and solid wheels it was certainly different.

It was very very different to other bikes I've had at the time, or had previously. Very long - a full wheel longer than my R1, and very low.

Took a different style to ride due to its design and easy to ride at slow speeds for a pretty heavy machine on paper but carried its weight really low. Open it up to use that 125bhp and it did take a bit of looking after and corners came up quick.

V-Rods are very low to the ground and has a very low seat height. Riding position with feet forward is cool. You find yourself adopting a lazy riding style if you just want to poodle around the country lanes. Bike had loads of torque so you can also get very lazy on the gear changing side of things as well.

On good roads and in a straight line this bike can rock. I've surprised many a sports bike rider who underestimated the bhp these things have away from traffic lights. This bike would pull through all the gears, happy to rev out in all of them and had gearing . If a sports bike rider hasn't got their machine in the right rev range, this will have them.

Bike came with Scremin Eagles and stage 1 as standard and they sounded nice. I wanted louder so got a set of Street Sweepers and wow they were loud.

The bike is a cruiser, just a really quick one, and I guess I tried to ride it a bit out of its comfort zone at times. They don't have much ground clearance so the footrests were down even at modest lean angles and the exhaust were not much after that either. I did fit alternate pegs which were about and inch higher so allowing more clearance.

The VRod will hustle along very well indeed and great fun but didn't like going round corners so you have scrub off most of the speed for every bend. If you're going a bit quick or if the corner is bumpy then the weight of the bike becomes very noticeable.

The solid wheels look great, but do have a slight drawback. As they are solid, the air turbulence on the front wheel when following a large van or lorry will make the bike shake it's head and you need to hold on tight. As this is such a heavy bike (and long) you can't afford to let it get too bad or it's going down. This seems to happen at speeds as low as 45mph. Once you know it's going to happen, it's pretty consistent and you should learn to work around it. What may catch you out at first is when you come in at speed behind a lorry and then look to sweep past it, the turbulence sometimes sets the wobble on and you have to rethink the maneuver. Also find that justs of wind from the side will push the bike sideways more because of the solid wheels. Anyway, these quirks are what makes these minds of bike.

You'll also need a different toolkit for these as they use a combination of metric and imperial fasteners and also Torx. I didn't do much in the way of home maintenance to be honest, but was surprised at how much effort was needed to do tasks such as change spark plugs, which needs the entire airbox removed.

This was a Harley I could get on with!

So why did I sell it?

Well to be honest I would have liked to have kept this bike long term but HD support where I live was awful when I had issues when the bike broke down while out, wouldn't start and needed AA recovery.

They couldn't offer any advise remotely when the bike was in my garage so had to arrange the bike being delivered to them. They then had the bike for over 3 months. They didn't seem to understand what they were doing on this model. The electronic package and diagnostic kit that came with this new breed of HD was a bit beyond them. Result was the bike was with them for months and on two occasions when I was told the bike was ready to pick-up it either wouldn't start when I got there or ran for 10 minutes before warning lights came on.

I had to get HD UK to get involved to resolve the problems and as soon as I got it back, I sold it.