Want to circumnavigate the globe? Well, you could follow Dennis Tito, the first space tourist and borrow a space shuttle and hope there is no cloud cover. Or you could save yourself a few hundred million, get the Dominator and have tons of fun instead.
At BSM, we have made it a bit of a habit to unearth some of the most amazing machines in the country. This time around though, the spec sheet reads like a meek apology. Lets talk numbers. Power? 43 bhp. Pah! Cylinders? Well, its got one of those. Then there is the top speed, which at just about 170 kph is measly. However, there is a point to this thing. But first let me tell you how this Domi came into being.
You see, back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, there was a brief fascination for big road-going trailies in single and twin forms. Quite expectedly, every Japanese maker worth their salt built one. So, there was the XT600 single and XTZ750 twin from Yamaha, the KLR 650 single and KLE500 twin from Kawasaki and the DR range from Suzuki. Honda, for their part, had this – the NX650, or what they called the Dominator. The motor came from their then retro bike, the XBR500, and while it retained the 4 valve head, Honda stretched the 500 to 650cc. Then they shoved it into an off-road frame and gave it the high seat, high bar, big wheel, scrambler exhaust combo. A two inch fairing and a bash plate gave it its road going pretensions. Styling was, for the time at least, supersharp.
But then, you need to realise that not every motorcycle is a boy racer’s dream on wheels. And that’s when you start to see the point of this thing. In the adolescent world of nought to sixty runs and quarter-mile times, the Domi seems to be cut out for the real challenges of adulthood. Like crossing deserts, wading into rivers and traversing equatorial rain forests.
While on most bikes the dark mood of the sky tells you ‘The party is over, chum’, on the Dominator the party has just begun. And then it’s up to you to play Alexander or Genghis Khan – conquer continents, traverse tundra or be a jungle juggernaught.
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