Husqvarna’s BMW-powered naked bike has been officially unveiled on both image and video fronts and will be called the Nuda 990R. We suggested the Shark, so how close were we?
As previously announced on the Bikesales Network, the Nuda will feature a reworked 900cc version of BMW’s 800cc parallel twin engine, and our intelligence suggests it will be good for 100hp-plus and an impressive 100Nm of torque.
Together with altered exhaust and airbox designs, Husqvarna claims the new 900 will be "linear and smooth at low rpm, but strong and outstanding at high revs”.
BMW's F 800 R engine has a bore and stroke of 82mm x 75.6mm and judging by Husqvarna's comments of an “outstanding” top end, it's likely that stroke will remain relatively unchanged and bore will be increased.
The F 800 R naked produces 87hp and 86Nm, but we’ve always felt that BMW engineers could extract a lot more than that, but at the risk of robbing the machine of much of the flexibility that's a central part to its character. We’ll find out what direction has been taken soon enough.
Outside the furnace, a fully adjustable Sachs 48mm fork and Ohlins shock have been instilled as the top-shelf go-to suspension items, and Brembo monobloc calipers won’t have any problems bringing the motorcycle to a standstill – or doing a stoppie for that matter.
Weight is rumoured to be around the 175kg dry mark, and the wheelbase in the vicinity of 1450mm, so the bike should knife through bends with plenty of conviction.
On that score, the Nuda 900R has ‘point and shoot’ urban vessel written all over it, in the mould of bikes like the Aprilia Dorsoduro and Ducati Hypermotard. Will Husqvarna market the bike in that direction, or eschew the hooligan pitch and head more towards the naked bike genre?
We’re now awaiting more solid details on the Nuda, which, of course, simply means ‘Nude’ in Italian. But we’re not sure the new bike is any relation to the other Nuda we found, which is a class of comb jelly which has a complete absence of tentacles and swims freely among plankton.
As for the look, it’s best described as minimal robotica, with a sharp-edged design that leaves plenty of metal on show. The angular, compact design is radical shift away from the current crop of naked bikes and is sure to polarise opinion. Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
We expect the information to start flowing a little more freely from now on, ahead of the bike’s public unveiling at the EICMA motorcycle show at Milan in November.