TORQUE of the TOWN

In the space of 10 minutes we’ve gone from bossing downtown Lisbon traffic like a super-commuter late for his mochafrappuchino, carving along racetrack-polished coastal roads at sportsbike pace, pottering through sun-bleached, white-washed Portuguese villages like a meandering sightseer, to performing what amounts to an impromptu semi off-road hill-climb through a forest over uprooted, crumbling tarmac.

And right now Husqvarna’s Svartpilen 701 is comfortably drumming along a classic combination of smooth, twisty hillside asphalt like a sports tourer, albeit one that weighs a flyweight 175kg dripping wet, has no fairing and not a great deal of capacity for luggage much beyond a tankbag. All this on a single, solitary, single. Who says one-dingers aren’t versatile?

But it’s a big one, literally. The engine at the core of Husqvarna’s Svartpilen 701 (Svartpilen means ‘black arrow’; the sibling Vitpilen 701 is ‘white arrow’) is a 692.7cc, 75bhp four-stroke single lifted lock, stock and especially barrel from KTM’s 690 Duke, and housed in a chassis similarly originating from Husqvarna’s parent