In 1984, Erik Buell designed the RW750 for the AMA Formula 1 racing class. When the class was dropped, only two examples were built. The project never became a racing series, but it reveals his starting point: a motorcycle was an engineering problem first, rather than another version of an established model.
Over the following years, Buell developed road-going sport motorcycles using Harley-Davidson engines. The approach paired an American twin with a sportier chassis concept. Later, the XB family placed fuel inside an aluminium frame and mounted the front brake rotor near the wheel’s perimeter. Those decisions made the machine visibly different before it even moved.
After the first company chapter, Buell founded Erik Buell Racing in 2010. It initially supplied racing parts and then moved into building the 1190RS. The thread running through his work is the exchange between racing ideas and road machinery: the RW750 setback did not end his efforts to reconsider how a sport motorcycle could be built.