YAMAHA VIRAGO

carves his sweetheart's name in the smooth bark. The kid with his first baseball glove painstakingly inks his name on the back of the mitt in awkward block letters along with his little-league number. Uncle Jack still can't resist pin striping his Japanese econobox and bolting on a set of window louvers. Chrome has always been the classic medium for customizing motorcycles, and. as the folks at Coca Cola have recently learned. Americans still love classics.

The big Virago has been with us for five years now. but in completely different forms. First available in 1981 as a 920cc air-cooled 75 -       degree twin, it then sported an enclosed-chain final drive and a monoshock rear suspension. Last year Yamaha overhauled the boomer, bumping its displacement to an actual 98 Ice 

 clones make.  The original Virago used a mono-coque frame with a stamped-steel backbone housing the air filter for the two carburetors. The single-shock rear suspension was of the early Monocross type. familiar too to those acquainted with the TZ750: a single shock attached directly to the frame at one point and directly to the swing-arm bracing without linkages of any kind to provide ns mg-rate springing or damping. The machine's appointments leaned clearly toward the cafe crowd, and the bike presented itself to the market as a Euro-sport touring mount, a strong yet easygoing alternative to the ubiquitous air-cooled inline-fours.

In '84. however, style took over. The biggest-selling fun-sized two-wheelers were cruisers, the hottest of them all a twin. The big Virago kept its engine and its name, and that was about all. The new bike still uses the engine as a stressed member, but two air cleaners now feed the bike's two carbs, and each filter lives in its own chromed plastic

through a three-millimetre bore increase, but making no other fundamental alterations to the engine.

The engine modifications, though, are the least important changes. Yamaha offered the Virago as a shaft-drive or a chain-drive bike in the twilight of the twin's single-shock days, and in 1984 the chain was gone for good. So loo was the monoshock, traded for two short shocks wrapped in bulbous coil springs.

It's tempting to think of the Virago 1000 as a variation on the 920, but to put the bike in its proper perspective you must look at it as a totally different machine. Except for the basic power-plant. Yamaha completely dumped the old Virago in '84 and kept only the name. We've seen such moves before: Honda kept an engine and changed everything else, calling the two results the V65 Magna and Sabie. clearly two different machines. Even though the very term motorcycle draws our mind's eye to the engine, merely using the same  engine in radically divergent chassis does not