VERY MAXIMUM!
VERY MAXIMUM! It was only a ‘cruiser’, so what could go wrong? This was the line going through my head when I saddled up a Yamaha V-Max for the very first time way back in 1995. Hell, I’d ridden a Honda CBR900RR FireBlade by this point, Suzuki’s GSX-R1100 and many other performance machines, including a Laverda Jota – what would a decade-old Yamaha with a V4 motor derived from a relaxed custom bike do to me? Ha! Easy peasy… And then I rode it. Hellfire! My mistake was not looking where I was going – please wait before you condemn me. There was that little tachometer atop the tank that, when it hit 6000rpm, took off. Literally… Of course, I wanted to ‘watch’, I always had a morbid fascination, be…