TO THE MAX!
The original V-max earned a mighty reputation, but some performancecrazed owners and bike builders in the 1990s regarded Yamaha’s standard V4 as merely the starting point for an outrageous special. These three were arguably Europe’s best…
As if 125bhp wasn’t enough – some took the V-max even further!
Fritz Egli’s V-max would have been outrageous anywhere in the world, so coming from Switzerland it was mind-blowing. The Swiss have long been famed for caution and cleanliness; their country for fanatically policed speed limits, draconian noise limits and a ban on motor racing. Get caught being naughty on a bike here, even 25 years ago, and it was likely to be impounded while you were marched off to jail.
So one sunny Sunday morning in 1995 I was just outside Egli’s base in the village of Bettwil, near Zurich, aboard a bright yellow V-max special, cruising down the winding hillside roads with a highly tuned 1200cc V4 motor that was just waiting to be unleashed. Jutting through the top of the dummy fuel tank between my legs was a massive Weber carburettor, its unfiltered pair of alloy bell-mouths threatening castration. My left knee was resting on a small guard, behind which an exposed toothed belt was thrashing round as it took the crankshaft’s drive to a supercharger in the engine’s Vee.
Not all of the extra mixture being forced into the engine was arriving quite as required, judging by the way the bike was spluttering and lurching on part-throttle as I attempt to ease it gently past a gaggle of Sunday morning churchgoers. They didn’t look impressed. This was one conspicuous motorbike, thanks mainly to its aggressively snub-nosed profile and loudly barking Supertrapp silencers.
Clear of the village, I reached a straight and wound open the throttle – and the bike almost ripped my arms out of their sockets as it rocketed away with a blood-curdling shriek from the supercharger. My left foot flicked frantically through the gearbox to keep up, the V-max just kept pulling harder and harder, my eardrums felt as though they were going to split as I crouched over the trumpeting carb – and then I backed off and braked as a bend approached with the Yamaha still accelerating hard and well over 100mph on the clock.
By any standards this was a wild and exhilarating machine. If producing over 200bhp, weighing over 250kg and having the aerodynamics of the Eiger’s North Face were not enough, it also made its power so brutally and unpredictably that its pilot could not relax for a split second.
Fritz Egli had generally been associated with power and speed, in a career stretching right back to his days in the 1960s as Swiss hill-climb champion on a Vincent-engined machine that used his own chassis. Egli’s steel spine frames became popular in the 1970s, typically holding big four-cylinder road or race motors from Honda and Kawasaki.
Fritz later got heavily involved with the V-max, which ironically was very popular in Switzerland, particularly in the full-power form that Egli imported it from the States. (Secret switches to cut power and noise to legal levels were a popular modification.) His supercharged special was built initially as a static exhibit for a local bike show, but such was the response that he set to work to make it run.
The blower was a Roots unit, designed for car use, which pumped the 1198cc V4 motor with up to 10psi of pressure. Its drive belt, running almost unprotected up the left of the engine, was guaranteed to turn the rider’s left leg into something fit for a fondue unless a knee-out cornering stance was adopted, at all times. Internals included lower-compression forged pistons, retarded ignition, Carrillo rods and stronger clutch. On Motorrad magazine’s dyno the Max made 201bhp at
9150rpm, its output still rising at that point.
Fritz had figured he’d better upgrade the chassis too. The steel frame gained strengthening gussets round the swingarm. He bolted on a pair of his firm’s 43mm forks, plus a hefty brace. A pair of Konis held up the rear. The rear wheel was sliced and re-welded to allow fitment of a wider, 170-section Pirelli.
Fritz had warned that the bike was hard to ride, and he wasn’t joking. Main problem was not the massive power, or even the way it was produced, but the motor’s inability to run steadily on a constant throttle. The bike repeatedly lurched forward and then choked, its erratic progress emphasised by the violence with which it ripped and screamed towards the horizon when the power came rushing in.
Cornering was equally exhilarating, and occasionally terrifying. The way this bike’s motor kept cutting in and out meant there was no way I could get round a bend quickly, because a sudden burst of power would have spat me into the Alpine scenery. At least the upgraded suspension and brakes made the brute okay-ish at a gentler pace.
Even the redoubtable Fritz was not crazy enough to sell bikes like this, or kits that would have enabled customers to build their own. But respect was due to the man for creating such a loud and leery machine. With the world getting gradually more like Switzerland as legislators and nanny-staters close in, Egli’s mad yellow V-max remains a vivid reminder of 1990’s two-wheeled excess.
Kainzinger V-max, Germany, 1998
Herbert Kainzinger had come to Misano to ride his V-max special himself on that fateful day back in 1997, and hadn’t planned to let anyone else out on it. But the local bike journalist was so persuasive that eventually Herbert relented: mistake.
At the start of his second lap of the Italian track the journo cranked into a left-hander and opened the throttle too quickly – sending himself into orbit, and the bike bouncing into the gravel-trap in a shower of splintering carbon-fibre.
The crash was unforgivable, but easily explained – because Kainzinger’s Max made even a factory Superbike look almost tame by comparison. During the year that he took to rebuild it, Herbert detuned it slightly. That still left the 1680cc V4 delivering 198bhp to the back wheel via its chain-drive conversion. Even more impressive was that in the right hands, this V-max was actually totally at home on a racetrack.
Herbert is a former national level road-racer and GP chief mechanic who still runs an upmarket tuning business (www.kainzinger.com) from his base near Hockenheim. In the 1990s he liked to mix business with pleasure by going on track days with the Max, and blowing stunned sports bike riders into the weeds. Then he’d pull into the pits, park the bike on its neat detachable alloy side-stand, and take orders for everything from chassis and engine bits to complete super-tuned specials.
This black bike was about as far removed from the lumbering standard Yamaha as it was possible to get. Thanks to scores of special parts and copious use of carbon and titanium, it weighed just 187kg dry, so was barely heavier than the best contemporary sports bikes, and a whopping 75kg lighter than a stock V-max.
Kainzinger had completely rebuilt the Yamaha’s 16-valve powerplant, using Cosworth pistons to raise
compression and increase capacity to 1680cc: genuine carbon air-scoops commenced the reworked intake system, feeding a power-boosting chamber inside the dummy carbon tank.
A quartet of 41mm downdraft Keihins fed mixture to a radically reworked combustion chamber, via big titanium inlet valves which, since Herbert had detuned the bike slightly, were operated by standard cams. A hand-built titanium and carbon pipe contributed to the power. Kainzinger’s painstakingly constructed chain-drive conversion delivered it to the 190-section Pirelli Dragon Corsa.
Almost everything on the chassis was modified or custom made, starting with a frame featuring one-off aluminium cross-plates and adjustable headstock. Suspension combined WP inverted forks and German-made Technoflex shocks; PVM supplied magnesium 17-inch wheels and six-pot front calipers. Cooling was by a modified BMW 5-Series car radiator. Lashings of carbon-fibre, a Hyperpro steering damper and Stack digital instruments added further neat touches.
The resultant beast was phenomenal. As well as having weight and wheelbase figures typical of a super-sports bike, it had a near-flat torque curve and had been clocked at 188mph. The hand-built V4’s precisely balanced internals made the bike very smooth, too, although the V4 motor was now solidly mounted.
That said, my first impressions on narrow hill roads around Kainzinger’s base near Frankfurt were decidedly mixed. The effortless power was instantly impressive but at slow speed the bike tracked road imperfections, frequently twitched in annoyance and generally felt like a frisky racehorse complaining at being asked to go pony-trekking.
Ironically given the Max’s slothful ancestry, the problem was simply that it was set up for a racetrack, and needed to be ridden much more aggressively. The answer was to forget any notion that this Yamaha was related to a V-max, and simply ride it like a sit-up-and-beg R1. Before long I was feeling totally at home charging up to a corner, applying the fiercely potent front brake, then carving through the turn with the bike totally under control, its suspension unfazed and its sticky Pirellis clinging on for dear life.
At higher speeds the handling was a revelation, far exceeding anything that seemed possible from a bike related, however distantly, to a V-max. But back in the days before traction control it was important not to get carried away with the loud handle, because this bike could be seriously vicious. Kainzinger said it made more torque at tick-over than a GSX-R750 did at maximum revs. That was totally believable every time I grabbed a handful of throttle in third gear and found the Stack console trying to smack me in the visor.
No wonder Kainzinger could lap a typical circuit faster than most sports bike riders – and had already turned down an offer of US $100,000 for the Max. As well as a blast to ride on track days all over Europe, it was the perfect advert for his tuning shop. As he put it: “If I haven’t done good business by the end of the day, I haven’t been trying hard enough.”
Loomans V-max, 1996
It’s said that dogs often resemble their owners, and the same can be true of motorbikes. Crit Loomans was short and hugely powerful, with a gym-built physique that had earned him top-four placings in the Mr Netherlands bodybuilding contest in the early Nineties.
His V-max was the perfect accompaniment. Low, wide, brutally styled and fearsomely powerful, Loomans’ much-modified 1500cc Max made Yamaha’s standard so-called muscle-bike look like the kind of wimp that got sand kicked in its face on the beach. The Max also had a competition record of its own: having earned Crit and his girlfriend Pasquale a free trip to Daytona after readers of a Dutch mag had voted it the country’s best custom bike.
It was easy to see why the Max had topped the poll. This was one mean looking motorbike, from the nitrous oxide bottle mounted on its WP upside-down front forks, via the breathed-on V4 powerplant all the way back to the single-sided swingarm sitting below a high-level Yoshimura can. The basic V-max
look and powerplant were intact, but almost every major component had been changed.
Much of the work had been done by French specialists Tuning Formula, including cosmetic details such as the neat little aluminium surround for the twin GSX-R400RR headlights, the restyled tailpiece and the oversized fake air-scoops. They also hotted-up the engine, whose capacity was enlarged from the standard 1198cc to 1497cc using high-comp Wiseco pistons.
Camshafts and valves remained standard, but the 90-degree V4’s heads had been flowed, the fuel tap enlarged and the carbs modified with a Dynojet kit to match the Tuning Formula’s four-into-one exhaust. The clutch was a Kevlar-plate unit from PDQ (remember their V-max show-stopper?), but Crit had not been tempted by the Berkshire firm’s chain-drive conversion. “With a chain you have to clean the bike more often and there’s more vibration.”
Instead, Tuning Formula had moved the driveshaft axle out by 5mm to give clearance for the Max’s 190-section rear Pirelli Dragon. The French firm’s aluminium single-sided swingarm worked a vertical WP shock. Changing from the original twin-shock layout had necessitated framestrengthening at the rear, but the steel tubes were otherwise standard.
Formula’s yokes held the WP upside-down fork legs further apart. Other bits included 17-inch wheels from Fischer of Germany, 320mm brake discs and six-pot Harrison Billet calipers, and an RGV250 front mudguard. Ahead of the forks, in the place where Harley riders traditionally stash their sleeping-bags, was the bottle containing nitrous oxide.
The bottle’s effect on steering, rather than power, was one of the first things I noticed after jabbing the big V4 into life and setting off for a spin from Crit’s place near Maastricht. Moving the bars at low speeds required notably more effort than normal, which was doubtless no problem for the bike’s regular rider, whose arms were wider than my legs.
Despite this and the substantial all-up weight, the Yam was great for cruising about town. Its footrests were slightly higher and rear-set, but throttle and clutch actions were light. Apart from the tiniest hint of hesitation just off idle the V4 carburetted superbly, its vast reserves of low-rev torque always at the ready for a burst of warp-drive acceleration. With its extra cubes helping to fill the 6000rpm dip in the standard Max’s torque curve, the Loomans bike gathered pace with effortless ferocity. And when revved harder it really did shift, the needle of its tiny dummy-tank-mounted tacho spinning almost instantly to the redline through the lower gears as I held on with arms and neck straining, scenery blurring and exhaust note lost in the wind. Given enough space it would have been good for 150mph, but instead I always had to back off, generally to wrestle it into a fast-approaching curve. The bars unfailingly gave a slight shimmy then calmed down again as the bike found itself back in a straight line.
The V-max would have been even more entertaining if I’d been able to give it a top-gear burst of nitrous oxide, which increased peak output from 143bhp to a dyno-tested 187bhp. But Crit had said no, he didn’t want me pressing the button. And this was one owner I wasn’t about to argue with…