The Harley-Davidson V-twin Racing Street Custom, or VRSC for short, is a bike like no other in the Milwaukee company’s portfolio. Born in 2001 as a means to mainly fight off the Japanese muscle bikes (but others, too), it stayed in production long enough to draw in a massive fan base, but also to stir an entire custom industry based around it.
As one of Europe’s (and probably one of the world’s) largest custom motorcycle garages, German Thunderbike transformed the VRSC into a core product as well, coming up over the years with all sorts of builds based on what was at the time of its introduction the first Harley street bike with a modern engine with DOHC and liquid cooling.
We’ve seen a number of these VRSC-based Thunderbike builds over the past year or so, but these guys’ portfolio is so vast we’ll probably keep on talking about it for a while longer.
We’’ll kick off this weekend with something called Track Racer, a VRSC conversion described as a true power cruiser. The build is based on one of the many VRSC variants thrown into the mix over the line’s existence, the V-Rod – that would be the variant that was in production from 2002 to 2006, when the Night Rod made its way out into the open.
Wrapped in black with effective traces of red on the massive fuel tank and fenders, the bike is the recipient of a large number of changes. There’s a new, custom swingarm, new wheels, a bespoke body kit, new fenders, in-house pulley and brake discs, but also smaller parts, like custom grips, radiator cover and license plate frame.
The entire build, looking like a very shiny muscle bike with an attitude, cost around 6,000 euros ($7,200 at today’s exchange rates) to put together, but that does not include the base bike, the man-hours, and probably a host of other parts we are not being told anything about.