Lazareth’s supercharged Buell XB12S custom

October 16, 2007 Ludovic Lazareth has impressed us before with his eye-catching and unique customs. Somewhat of a legend in the French tuning and custom building scene, Lazareth’s latest has fascinated us on a technical level as much as for its brutal good looks.

Completed the day before the Paris Bike Show kicked off, the latest Lazareth beast is a worked . We just missed out on meeting the man himself to learn more about the bike, but what we know already is fascinating; retaining the stock frame and motor, pretty much the rest of the bike is pure Lazareth.

The stock XB12S puts out a little over 100 horsepower, which makes for a lively enough streetbike given the Buell’s traditionally short wheelbase and the grunty delivery of the Harley-Davidson motor. Lazareth has fitted a supercharger from a Mini Cooper S to pump the beast up and take it into lunatic territory.

The front wheel will likely spend a lot of its time at eye-level, which is just as well because it’s mounted on a single-sided fork assembly that people will want to gawk at. The rear wheel, likewise, gets a single-sided swingarm, so the left profile of the bike is very tidy indeed – except for the huge belt drive for the supercharger.

We’re told that Lazareth has built this Buell with adjustable steering head angle and swingarm length – so it’s possibly one of the most tunable chassis setups we’ve ever seen on a roadbike, opening up a wide range of handling characteristics.

We can’t tell you how the front-end suspension works – but we do know that Lazareth is planning to use this bike as a platform for experimentation with an electronically managed suspension system. It could be something as simple as the electronic adjustment system available on bikes such as the , or potentially something as groundbreaking as the . It’s certainly time somebody other than BMW started looking for superior alternatives to the telescopic fork, which has hardly changed in the last 50 years other than being turned upside down.

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