2018 Husqvarna Vitpilen 701 Dyno

The 2018 Husqvarna Vitpilen 701 carries a retail price of $11,999 and is available in one color, silver, with a yellow line running diagonally from the back of the gas tank to the muffler mount.

This brand-new urban street racer is powered by the same 693cc single-cylinder engine that also propels Husky’s 701 Supermoto and the 690 Duke produced by parent company KTM.

We ran our Vitpilen 701 on the dyno in fourth gear to get the peak power output from the big single. We got a total of 70.95 hp at 8,200 rpm and 51.08 pound-feet of torque at 6,730 rpm.

“Wrangling the Vit’s feisty engine is easy to thanks to precise ride-by-wire throttling. It’s also surprisingly smooth for a big single, feeling more like a V-twin at idle and at speed thanks to comprehensive counterbalancing that includes a weighted shaft in the cylinder head. The engine has a few other tricks up its sleeve in the form of integrated coolant passages (for compactness and a clean appearance), a slipper clutch, dual-spark combustion chamber, traction control, and even a quickshifter and auto-blip downshifting.”—Ari Henning