CarBrandLogos archive · Yamaha · 1985

YamahaVMAX

A V4 from a touring bike, a drag strip mindset, and twenty years unchanged.

Photo: fotois.com from Kanagawa-ken, Japan · CC BY 2.0

The story

A defining chapter in Yamaha history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Yamaha VMAX, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

Yamaha's American arm wanted a motorcycle built around one idea: acceleration in a straight line, in the tradition of the drag strip rather than the racetrack. The VMAX of 1985 delivered it by taking the 1197cc liquid-cooled DOHC 70-degree V4 from the Venture tourer, adding a system Yamaha called V-Boost that opened passages between the intake tracts above 6,000rpm so each cylinder could draw on two carburettors, and wrapping the result in bodywork that hid nothing.

Yamaha 1700 VMax · Dédélembrouille · CC BY-SA 3.0

Design and engineering

The styling was as important as the engineering. Massive fake air scoops flanked the tank, the exhausts were stubby, and the whole machine was built to look like a fist. Reviewers noted that the chassis and brakes were not remotely equal to the engine and that the handling grew alarming at speed, and almost none of them cared, because the way it launched was unlike anything else on sale.

VMAX day 2009. Engine cutaway, side · fotois.com from Kanagawa-ken, Japan · CC BY 2.0

In production

It created a category. Power cruisers from Honda, Suzuki and eventually Harley-Davidson all followed the template the VMAX set, and Yamaha found it had a bike with a following intense enough that changing it would have been a mistake.

Legacy

So it barely did. The VMAX ran essentially unaltered from 1985 to 2005, a span almost unheard of in the Japanese industry, before a much larger and more sophisticated 1679cc replacement arrived in 2009. The original is the one people mean.

At a glance