![]() I wanted to do openings on the sprockets to give mud or foreign objects a place to go. But the Gates belts wouldn’t work off-road, getting damaged by stones or packing with mud and getting overtightened. “But Harley didn’t want us doing a chain and show that there were any weaknesses in belt drives. Stefanelli says there were places that Harley-Davidson just wouldn’t let Buell go with the Ulysses, in the kind of micromanagement that used to drive Erik Buell crazy: “Originally, it was going to be a chain final drive,” Stefanelli says. Tires remained 17-inchers at both ends, more supermoto than dirt bike. We accepted those trade-offs because of the higher likelihood of our customers using the bike on road.” The eventual positioning of the Ulysses wasn’t as a trailbike, but as a “bad road bike,” something you could take down the gnarliest asphalt or gravel road quickly and comfortably. “The question was: Where does this adventure bike fit in? We ended up geared up on-road performance, more an SUV with some off-road capability. “There were several meetings talking about larger-diameter front tires, 19s or 21 s,” Fox says. “The rear cylinder head was where it was, and shortening travel was the only option.”īy that time, the direction of the bike was taking shape. According to Stefanelli, the solution was shortening the suspension travel a little more than an inch to get the seat height lower. It wasn’t a big issue for Stefanelli, who always had at least one KTM competition enduro bike in his garage, but for somewhat height-challenged Fox, it meant he struggled to get a foot on the ground when the bike was stopped. We increased the suspension travel, lifting the bike up, and increased the luggage capacity.” Some of those choices were planned, while others weren’t anticipatedīoth Stefanelli and Fox recall the first prototypes as being super tall. Stefanelli remembers the beginning of the project: “We wanted parts commonization with other XB models to keep the cost of tooling and the overall cost down, but we needed to hit the features and specs target: ‘the most fun-to-ride adventure-touring bike.’ Given our engine, we knew we needed to emphasize the street portion, but it also had to be fun off-pavement.Įrik wasn’t shy about letting us use different triple clamps, forks, rear subframe-but he wanted to keep the same airbox and stuff.”įox remembers, “As we got into it, we ended up making changes to the frame, the steering-head angle, we made changes to the rear, the subframe and the shock mount location on the frame. While probably 20 or more people at Buell actively worked on the Ulysses development at one point or the other, the three who most shaped it were Stefanelli, Erik Buell, and John Fox, the lead design engineer for the project. ![]() ![]() So we did a lot of testing to make sure that the bike was stable at its top speed.” There wasn’t any legal place to do quick top-speed stability tests on a new configuration near the Buell offices, so Interstate 43 it was. He explains, “Some manufacturers at the time put a speed limit on a fully loaded adventure bike with weight in the luggage: 110 mph or so. Tony Stefanelli, who was the platform director in charge of Buell Ulysses development, doesn’t mind sharing that story a decade and a half after the event, even if it got a little heated back in the day. The message was essentially this: “Stop your guys from top-speed testing on Interstate 43 right now! People driving to work at H-D keep telling me that they’ve been passed by bikes on Buell factory plates going about a million miles an hour.” It was to Jon Flickinger, the president of Buell Motorcycles, and it was from Gail Lione, head of Buell-owner Harley-Davidson’s legal department. It was the kind of phone call no CEO wants to get. When Buell developed an American adventure bike
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