I got the opportunity to ride a VR1000 at Portland International Raceway during Blue Groove/Northwest in 1997; it was a particularly thrilling experience. Wish I had an extra 75 large just lying around...
According to "25 Years of Buell"...Erik actually designed the first VR - including fuel-in-frame, side-radiators, large airbox volume, and forward weight bias. Long story short, HD then bagged his FinF design, tried a tubular frame, found out it didn't work, and designed their own boxed frame (with traditional fuel tank / small-volume airbox design)...pushing the rider back on the chassis, pushing the weight back on the chassis, dropping the power, and compromising the handling.
As a side note, Erik's obsession/understanding of airbox volume requirements for twins came directly from Cosworth. They understood that a twin takes huge gulps of air, intermittently, as opposed to an IL4 that is constantly sipping smaller pulses of air. Erik picked up on that theory and kept it as part of his designs. The FinF design came from a combination of airbox volume needs...and frame stiffness. Box frames are crazy-rigid; Erik simply "went bigger" with the box beams and filled them with liquid, allowing the "fuel tank" space to become airbox volume (with the added benefit of a same-handling chassis regardless of a full tank or empty tank, since the fuel was down low on the motorcycle - can you say "mass centralization"?).
Several folks here have been buying them for between $100 and $200 over the last year . . . Grizzly's is still listed on Amazon with all the autographs.
I got one for about sixty five bucks on E-bay last November. Read it front to back the night I opened the shipping sleeve. I intend to increase its value by taking it to every Buell gathering in hopes of gaining autographs of as many parties to the book's production, Erik's, and other key BMC employees as I can. Then I intend to let my heirs find it in my estate one day, because no matter the market value, I wouldn't sell it.