Horex VR6

The Horex VR6 Roadster is, at its core, a teutonic bruiser that has no peers in the market. Sure there are big naked muscle bikes available from other brands but none offer the technical prowess of an ultra-compact and powerful six-cylinder powerplant. Nor do they offer the cachet and hand-assembled quality of the Horex. While the initial specs might have seemed improbable, the VR6 is here and is in showrooms more or less as-promised, a testament to the determination and skill of the company’s team in bringing such an advanced and unusual design to production in a relatively short period of time. Many brands have failed while offering far less exotic products, but Horex has weathered the initial doubts to produce one of the most interesting production machines to come out of Germany in a long time. 

Not only that, the VR6 adds another machine to the pantheon of legendary six-cylinder motorcycles, a rarified breed of exercises in engineering excess. Had Horex gone the conservative route and built a traditional four-cylinder roadster of similar specs, we wouldn’t be talking about it today, and you likely wouldn’t be drooling over it right now. If you want to get an inordinate amount of attention in the world of motorcycling, you must build a six. 

Piston engine layouts typically fall into three categories: inline, vee, and flat/boxer. The one setup you won’t find very often is the narrow-angle vee (or staggered cylinder) layout. Lancia was a pioneer of the format, introducing the 13-degree “Lambda” V-4 in 1922, and produced a series of narrow-angle designs up until the 1970s. A typical vee will have anything between 45 (Harley-Davidson V-twin) and 90 degree (Ducati L-twin). A narrow-angle vee (below 45 degrees) is so compact that both “banks” of cylinders can share the same block with a common cylinder head, making for a much more compact and lightweight package. You essentially combine the qualities of an inline engine with those of a vee – the block is as short as a vee, scarcely wider than an inline across the head, and shares the balance properties of an inline design. You get more cylinders into a much more compact package, with less complexity than a typical vee by combining the heads and block into a single unit.