Does your current motorcycle leave you wishing for more horsepower? If you’ve got an insatiable need, need for speed, then maybe the Hesketh Valiant SC is what you’re looking for.
Built in the UK around a supercharged S&S X-Wedge engine (2100 cc V-twin, with six-speed Baker transmission), the Valiant SC is a 2018 model, expected to cost £50,000 when it hits the market. That’s a lot more than even the Kawasaki H2R, which everyone reckoned was uber-pricey when it hit the market as the first factory supercharged motorcycle in years.
Dry weight for the Valiant SC is a rather porky 239 kg. However, that mass should still move 0-60 rather quickly, since it’s rated for 210 hp at 5,500 rpm and 217 ft-lb of torque at 3,000 rpm.
Naturally, given its factory custom nature, the Valiant SC is loaded with expensive billet bits and other bling. Find more details at the Hesketh website; more photos are available here.
Take a quick tour through the gallery of the SC and note the pic of with the large Hesketh brand emblem held on with a stripped wood screw painted black….and I was just about to send them a cheque!
Does that photo show the correct proportions? Or is it just a crude photoshop hack job? That motor looks to be about 25% too large to fit the space, and the swingarm looks 25% too short.
At least it’s not another unrideable chopper.
210 hp, eh? For how long? 🙂
This goes into the ‘more money than brains’ file.
Not quite sure how another’s perception of value vs your perception of not a good value equates to a lack of brains on their part. Plenty of people are happy to pay for exclusivity, despite the product not necessarily being objectively ‘better’. FWIW, I remember Lord Hesketh’s venture into F1 in addition to his earlier motorcycle offering. While the motorcycles themselves may not be technological wonders, Hesketh himself is a genuine gearhead with a love of all things mechanical. For me, that’s good enough. I can’t afford one and wouldn’t buy one even if I could. That said, I’m always happy to see people following their vision.
“Lord Hesketh formed Hesketh Motorcycles. In 1982 a modern purpose built factory was set up to manufacture the Hesketh V1000 motorcycles in Daventry. However, there were numerous problems. The bikes were heavy, made worse by a high riding style; and unreliable, with numerous manufacturing problems adding to an overheating rear cylinder due to lack of air flow. The resultant bad press combined on top of an under-developed bike, lack of cash and a collapsing market meant that after the production of 139 bikes, the company went into receivership. The Triumph Motorcycles co-operative looked at buying the rights to the machine, as they lacked a new model beyond the aged Triumph Bonneville. A V1000 machine even appeared with a Triumph badge on its tank, but Triumph also lacked funding to buy and develop the machine. In 1983, Lord Hesketh formed a new company called Hesleydon Ltd to manufacture a revamped V1000 with a full fairing, called the Vampire. However, although the company had produced a motorcycle with export potential in mind, the Vampire retained too many of the V1000’s faults and only 40 were produced before the company closed again in 1984.”
Enough already….
Yawn, only 210 horsepower? Don’t most of the production litre bikes, priced at $18,000 CAN, come with about the same power?