Victory Motorcycles 2012 High Ball ride review

On the face of it, making a motorcycle as refined and thoroughly modern as the Victory Vegas go all raw and retro might strike you as a task only slightly tougher than, say, making Taylor Swift go goth. Yet that’s what Victory’s done, and done convincingly enough, with their new 2012 High Ball.

It’s a swarthy thug of a bobber, the High Ball, and as it turns out effecting that unlikely transmutation proved remarkably easy, requiring only three steps, to wit: 1) Mount a pair of pudgy 16-inch whitewalls on laced wheels. 2) Bolt on a set of wickedly angular nose-bleed apehangers with wiring that looks like it’s wrapped with electrical tape. 3) Load the Binks with rat-grade flat black and commence blasting away. Voila. Attitude.

That rude treatment blends effectively with the underlying Vegas style points—the bold outsize headlamp, ridge-backed bodywork, split-tail fuel tank, and frenched-in taillight—to result in a bike that’s undeniably unique among bobber-inspired models on the market today. We applaud that sleight of hand, and we applaud the fact that the High Ball is also undeniably a bike best suited to rangy operators.

It’s the apes that do it. All Victory cruisers have the same essential rear-monoshock chassis and an architecture dictated by the massive Freedom 106/6 powertrain, and that architecture results in a seating position that’s set well-back from the steering head. The High Ball’s siblings make accommodation for a wide range of body types by canting the handlebar sharply back from the triple tree, putting the grips within easy reach of the operator. That’s a practical necessity and a signature styling element of the breed. The High Ball’s not going there. It’s uncompromising in its badass attitude and sticks its apes straight up in the air like its flipping off convention. Reach for the sky, it menaces.

Cognizant of the pesky fact that the height of the High Ball’s apes might fall afoul of senseless equipment regulations in some jurisdictions, the Victory engineers built a second position option into the arrangement such that the bars can be flattened to the near-horizontal in much the same way as its cruiser stablemates. That adjustment requires a pair of Allen wrenches and a screwdriver to both tilt the bars back in the risers and reposition the hand controls to align with the altered state. We couldn’t bring ourselves to do it. Perhaps in the interest of thoroughness in this review we should have, but it struck us as just wrong. Futzing with the formula and moving the apes from their intended upright position would, in our view, compromise the model’s go-to-hell aesthetic, and with it its bobber cred and main selling point in the marketplace.

Granted, in stock configuration the reach to the grips is an unworkable stretch for short-limbed riders and they have our sympathy. They also have our advice to take a pass on the High Ball and consider something that will prove more ergonomically accommodating without the sacrifice of its very soul.

On the road with the High Ball is—pardon the technical jargon—a blast. To get the most out of the experience, though, you need to go tabula rasa and forget everything you know or think you know or think you ought to know about contemporary ergonomics and handling properties and just go for the ride, fists in the air, spine ramrod straight, boots planted amidships. The 130/90-16 Dunlop Cruisemax front tire gives the bike its easy-going low-speed handling personality and requires little coaxing to bank into a turn smartly. But don’t push it. The bike’s low 4.7-inch ground clearance—even lower than that of Harley’s Fat Boy Lo—makes grinding the foot pegs an inevitability in even moderate carving duty. No surprise there, though. That low stance also gives the bike a seat height of a mere 25 inches, and isn’t that really the point?

It’s only fitting that a bike as heavily defined by its apehangers as the High Ball should also run like the proverbial striped-ass ape, and that pretty well describes the performance of the Stage I Freedom 106/6 motor. That motor produces 97 horsepower and a lusty 113 ft/lbs of torque and gives the relatively-light 659-pound High Ball an off-idle thrust capable of peeling a monkey off a monkey tree. Whee. The posture enforced by the bike’s stretched ergos perfectly prepositions the rider for the charge.

At highway speeds the bike is an eerily smooth operator; the mirrors remain steady and only the slightest tingle of vibration makes it up the long climb to the hand grips. There it’s barely perceptible owing to the excellent shape and composition of the grips which are unique to this model and Victory’s best in terms of both style and feel.

The complete redesign of the 6-speed overdrive transmission that came to all 2011 Victory models has taken virtually all of the quirks and fitfulness out of the box making it a nonissue in operation. That said, though, shifter throws remain somewhat long and loud in the lower gears (and maybe in the higher ones, too, and you just can’t hear it because of a combination of wind blast, exhaust bark, and some fool screaming whee).

The High Ball’s instrumentation consists of a single busy gauge that functions as a speedo, tach, odometer, tripmeter, clock, gear indicator and idiot light array. There’s no gas gauge except for a low-fuel warning light (that, we discovered, comes on with 1.5 gallons remaining in the 4.5-gallon tank), and your own ability to remember to reset the damn tripmeter, stupid. (Which is why we know about the low-fuel light.)

The 2012 High Ball comes in one flavor only, flat-black with white and a splash of red on the tank flanks, and retails for $13,499.