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An involuntary groan escapes my lips as I try to lift the Kawasaki Vulcan VN2000 off the chrome sidestand. It doesn't help. The bike remains obstinately aided by gravity, parked just off the vertical. Damn! When Kawasaki profiled the potential VN2000 rider, they obviously weren't considering weaklings like me. Or for that matter, lanky five foot eleven road testers – now that I've put all my weight into it, it's come off the stand, but I can just about reach the tip of the chrome sidestand, not enough to flick it up.
As a steady stream of invective builds in my throat, I wriggle past the sidestand, and to my utter dismay, I cannot find the key. I look on the sidepanels (Yamaha Road Stars have 'em there), under the steering head (various other cruisers). Then, the owner Sumesh Menon points it out, right on top of the headlamp. The tiny key is at sea in the horizon-filling vista of chrome that forms the top surface of a truly immense headlamp. I should probably make that lamp cluster, for the outsize oval includes a regular high beam and three projector lamps!
Before I thumb the starter, let me tell you a bit about Sumesh. We featured him most recently with his glimmering troika of Harleys. Obviously, he has moved on. Back then, he was proud of Milwaukee metal. Until one gloriously bright day, when he happened to slide into the saddle of the VN2000. At idle, it spoke gravely with a genuine V-twin beat, had pushrods and presence and more chrome than the middle east has oil. On the move, the 2053cc V-twin – the largest in production at the moment – turned mature riders into blabbering idiots. He just had to have one. Now, Menon can't imagine why he had the Harleys. 'I hate to call them that, but they're sluggish. And this bike is just so...'
What he leaves unsaid isn't hard to fathom. The V-twin produces as much thrust as the Saturn V rocket. Official figures are 17.9 kgm at a lowly 3,350 rpm and there's more. 13.5 kgm is on tap from idle to the redline. The superb V-twin even makes 100 bhp fifteen hundred rpm beyond the torque peak! The 409 kg (wet) VN2000 will thrum past 100 kph in four seconds. At the quarter mile, a little more than twelve seconds would have elapsed and the speedo would read an astounding 160+ kph – remember, this an eight-foot machine weighing 400+ kg.
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