2026 ICON Low Down & Shifty

1978 Yamaha XS650

She was a mess of a machine
350 lbs of heroin chic executed in cro-moly tube and hand-formed aluminum sheeting. Her tremendously overbuilt Yamaha® 650 parallel twin, now sporting 750cc of displacement and grossly optimistic cams, stood proud within her handcrafted perimeter frame. Dual Mikuni’s vaporized the dwindling petrol supplies as fed to them by a trio of daisy-chained Pingle petcocks. Agreed, it wasn’t a pretty arrangement, but these weren’t pretty times.

It was sun-bleached earth, with its cracked asphalt veins and disintegrating infrastructure
It had taken a brutal toll on most forms of motorized transport. Those that remained were an odd balance of necessity versus availability. Shifty was one of these. Sporting few creature comforts – oblique ergonomics, kidney-rupturing suspension, limited lighting and almost no fuel range – she existed on the fringes of a broken society. Low, Down, & Shifty was nothing this new world needed but everything it deserved.