CUSTOM & STYLE: Ecosse Moto Heretic X3

From the April 2005 issue of Cycle World.

As the name suggests, this bike is an outcast, almost villainous. Riding it is like carrying a weapon, trigger at the right handgrip. Interested?

Even if big-inch Harley power isn't your thing, the Ecosse Moto Heretic's enticing-yet-peculiar blend of bare-fisted American muscle, Italian-inspired chassis. Swedish suspension and thug-like-bike riding position is difficult to resist.

Helping you refrain from the impulse buy, however, is the $64,800 price tag! Okay, a super-expensive, hand-made American motorcycle constructed from fine materials and top-quality components is not for everybody. Who is it for? We defer to Don Atchison, who with wife and company CEO Wendy make up the top players of the Denver, Colorado—based Ecosse team (www.ecossemoto.com).

"We want the 50-year-old guy who grew up on dirtbikes and is looking to get back into riding,” says Don, a part-time roadracer who works primarily on design and testing. "Or if they got back into bikes through Harley-Davidson—which has done a great job getting people back into bikes—hey might look to us for something lighter and more sporty. We'd be happy with 0.5 percent of the Harley re-entry market."

Wouldn't everybody? Actually, with the Heretic production run limited to just 100, that .5 percent would probably be too many buyers.

So what drives a couple to chuck everything and invest all their time and money into starting an American motorcycle company?

"The idea for this bike began in the '90s," says 37-year-old Don. "I was thinking about it pretty seriously while going to grad school getting my MBA, and already had a BS in mechanical engineering. I had gotten back into bikes on Harleys, but after riding sportbikes and dirtbikes as a kid, it drove me nuts that Harleys wouldn't turn, wouldn't brake. I thought, 'Why can't someone retain the fun and torque of that motor in a chassis that works?'"

The Atchisons were even Bimota and Confederate dealers, dabbling in these obscure brands because "that's what we like." But during their time as dealers, both parent companies ran into financial troubles.

"At that point, we thought the only way we're ever going to do these kinds of things is to do them ourselves," said Don.

The company got its start in 2002. Why Ecosse? Why Heretic?

I'm about half Scottish, and there was an old race team in the 1950s called Ecurie Ecosse that raced Jaguars," says Don. "I thought it was cool that this essentially small club-level team became world-class. Nobody wanted to let them play, but they finally got to Le Mans and kicked ass."

As for Heretic, they like the image of a "heroic figure speaking out against the masses." but Don says it really stemmed from his days in engineering school: "I was a fan of Leonardo Da Vinci, and he’s known as the original heretic."

As the X3 designation implies, this is not Ecosse’s first Heretic, but rather, following experimental fighter—plane norms, the third version.

While the name game is fun, the thing that sets the Heretic apart from other not-chopper "customs" of its ilk is the quality of the riding experience.

First off, there is the motor. From idle (and below!) there is enough smooth torque to rip away from low speeds in any gear. The standard engine is a Nigel Patrick 107-cubic-inch (1753cc), carved-from-billet monster—if you want it polished like our testbike’s, add $2600. The only thing you might wish for is more revs. The 5800-rpm limit just feels like a restriction. Until you shift into the next gear, anyway, when all that torque is at the ready to again peel your eyelids back and shake your femurs to dust. Yes, there is some vibration characteristic to the big-inch 45-degree V-Twin. but it’s surprisingly tolerable considering what’s getting flung around in that long-stroke beast. In fact, lugging around at low revs, it’s not unlike a pre-counterbalanced Softail.

The only major cast pats you see on the engine are the inner cases. Cylinders, heads and the rest are all chipped from big blocks of alloy. Even the transmission case is made from billet. There is a 113-inch motor available that upgrades carburetor from the single 42mm Mikuni HSR flat-slide to a pair, featuring staggered opening for smoother response. That will set you back another $2600 for a motor with the basic machined finish, or $5500 for the full "show polished" version.

Our 107-inch rider turned in 100 horsepower and 100 foot-pounds of torque on the CW dyno, which fell short of Ecosse's expectations. Later investigation showed our testbike was delivered with lean jetting suitable for their mile-high Denver HQ, not L.A. Properly jetted, expect at least 115 on both counts, says Atchison. The 113-inch mill is said to produce 130 hp and 139 ft.-lbs. of torque.

The twin, high-mount aluminum exhaust cans take off the harsh edge that can come from a big-inch performance Evo-style engine. It’s still loud enough to make a statement, but has a roundness to the sound that makes listening a pleasure.

The six-speed gearbox is from Baker, with fine-tuning tweaks requested by Ecosse. Shift throws are short and engagement reasonably positive. The ratios are good, too, with an overdrive top gear helping to keep your molars intact and your pee from getting all fizzy after an extended spin at freeway speed or beyond.

The primary drive is surprisingly short. What gives?

“We played a little trickery with gearsets to make it as compact as possible,” says Don. “It’s about 4 inches shorter than a standard Harley primary drive. The big objective there is to get the swingarm pivot as far forward as possible. Burt Baker is one smart mofo.”

As you can see, the swingarm pivot is indeed very far forward, and a side effect is that the final-drive chain is quite long and must be set up on the loose side. It looks wrong when the bike is unladen, but the slack is taken up when the rider is seated. Tensioners were tested, but none held up.

Forged alloy O.Z. wheels carry Michelin rubber in sporty 120/70ZRl7 and 190/50ZRl7 sizes. You can have 200mm at the back, if you’re into that, but the 190 makes the bike handle better, according to Don.

A particularly cool chassis feature is the adjustable rear ride height for the Öhlins shock. There are three positions on the swingarm to accept the shock’s bottom eyelet, settings described by Ecosse as Roadracer, Cruiser and Dragster. The linkageless setup goes from a rising-rate, to neutral, to falling-rate in the respective positions, and seat height varies from 30.5 to 28 inches. There is also hydraulic shock-spring preload adjustment, with full damping tweaks (compression is even high- and low-speed tunable).

In the Cruiser mode, the bike handles pretty typically for this sort of American musclebike, in that it takes considerable effort to initiate a turn. Also, once you get it leaned over, you have to force it to stay there. Jack up the rear ride height, however, and you get a much better tip-in response, as well as more willingness to turn and stay turning. The raised rear improves cornering clearance, too. Still, this is a bike that takes a great deal of effort to quickly change direction, and it never lost its tendency to stand up while trail-braking. A GSX-R it ain’t. Action from the inverted 43mm Öhlins fork was well-controlled and offered a balanced ride in concert with the shock settings.

“We goofed off at Öhlins for a while, toyed with Superbike internals and got a good setup,” says Don. “That's how they ship them to us now.”

While the stand-up tendency—plus the touchy ISR six-piston front brakes—initially keep you from really taking it deep in corners, once you get a sense of what’s what, you really can have a good time. While steering isn’t super-quick (rake is spec’d at 30 degrees, wheelbase a long 61 inches), this is a very entertaining ride on a flowing backroad. Especially when you pull the trigger on that engine. It’s important to use a judicious hand on the throttle at deep lean, though. The bottomless torque makes it very easy to get the bike to squirm around when you’re on the edge of the tire. It was actually better to run a lot of revs through apexes, just because the torque curve is diminishing as you roll on the gas, making it less likely to surprise you with a sudden twitch! Which it will.

The seat discourages lingering or treating riding with a lack of enthusiasm. It is not particularly uncomfortable, but it is small and not overstuffed (a thicker seat is available). With power so plentiful, acceleration so frighteningly immediate, it is nice that the riding position is good, lending the pilot a feeling of control and oneness with the Heretic you almost never associate with that big-inch, potato-potato-potato sound in the engine room. The fact that the rear cylinder head is right next to your right leg, and that there is little seat or bodywork to shield you from engine heat means the rider gets quite a roasting, even on cooler days. But you didn't buy this bike to tour, did you?

No, probably not. One big reason to drop such large money on a Heretic is how it looks, and how it is made, not to ride from New York to Daytona before the thaw begins. The chrome-moly frame tubes are joined by machined steel lugs, all gorgeously constructed and welded. If chrome-moly is too pedestrian for you, Ecosse has already started work on a titanium-frame version. It will be sold in a brushed, uncoated finish, so you can see the rainbowed glory of the heat-affected zones around the welds come shining through. Price will at least double.

Every bodywork piece is carbon-fiber. The fuel tank is particularly trick in its construction, with multiple layers-a matrix of carbon-fiber, fiberglass and carbon-kevlar—to enhance resistance to crash damage. If you drop your $60K bike, you really don’t want it to go up in flames, too, do you?

The tapered aluminum handlebar can be had in a variety of bends, our tester fitted with a Honda “CR Low,” measuring about 34 inches tip to tip. There is plenty of leverage, and as mentioned above, you need it.

Some of the nice attention to detail can be found in the ISR control pods and switchgear. The necessary DOT symbols for the killswitch, horn and such, as well as all the mumbo-jumbo on the brake master cylinder (“Use DOT 4 Fluid, etc.”), are machined into the pieces.

“I refused to do stickers,” Don says flatly.

Ecosse makes the footpegs and foot controls, while tiny CRG bar-end mirrors provide an acceptable, fish-eyed notion of what’s behind you.

Overall, the Heretic is a striking piece with just about every item a work of art in its own right, except perhaps that flowerpot air-filter housing. Otherwise, it is sweet, indeed.

“We’ve kept a no-compromise philosophy in building this bike,” Atchison says. “Like the leather we use on the seat is this really trick, laser-etched stuff from Italy that’s eight times as expensive as what we used at first. The bill of materials cost has gone up dramatically since we started the project!”

As you would expect from a low-volume builder such as this, the sky is (almost) the limit in terms of personalizing your ride with options. But only up to a point.

“We’ll work with customers to build a bike to their tastes, as long as it doesn’t affect the engineering,” says Don. “We’ve got too much blood, sweat and tears in figuring how to make them work right.”

In this time of choppers, when popular culture has embraced the raked, apehanger-equipped “long” bike and style-conscious bobber, the Ecosse is a refreshing and interesting contrast, made more so by that big Evo powerplant, which Ecosse says just happened to be the right choice for this model.

“We’re not fixated on American V-Twins,” says Don with a smile. “We’ve been talking to other known engine manufactures about future models. It was just that for an all-out high-performance streetbike like the Heretic, we thought this was the best motor for that purpose. You can have a good time without going 100 mph.”

Cool thing is, you can also have a good time going 100 mph-plus. But that would be sorta heretical.