Marc Marquez has made a name for himself this season, not only by being a prodigy on two wheels, but also for being the light-hearted breath of fresh air that the MotoGP Championship needed so dearly.
Marquez himself is perhaps a stark contrast to his employer, the Honda Racing Corporation (HRC), which is known for being a bit more uptight and mechanical with its persona.
After watching the video after the jump, we think we can safely say that Nakamoto-san and his crew have redefined HRC…and they might just be having the most fun in the MotoGP paddock in the process.
So what happened to the lap times? When MotoGP tested here at Aragon back in June, Jorge Lorenzo was nearly one and a half seconds faster than his time on the first day of practice. Marc Marquez was half a second slower than his time in testing, despite being the fastest man after FP1 and FP2, Valentino Rossi was a second slower, and Dani Pedrosa was just a couple of tenths slower than his test time, set here three months ago.
The answer is simple: no grip. Grip is missing both front and rear, as temperatures have soared unusually high at the Spanish circuit. The track is also dirtier: a car event held before the test had laid rubber down and swept the track clean, but that was not the case ahead of this weekend. The lack of grip has meant everyone has struggled to match the lap times from earlier in the year.
While David is in Aragon, I am down in Laguna Seca for the World Superbike races (apparently AMA Pro Racing is here too, though you wouldn’t know it from their TV contract), and Aprilia USA just debuted and confirmed that the alphabet soup that is the 2014 Aprilia Tuono V4 R APRC ABS will be landing on US soil starting in October 2013.
The naked version of the venerable Aprilia RSV4 R APRC ABS superbike, the Tuono V4 R is our hands-down favorite liter-class streetfighter, with its burly, yet smooth, power delivery, and industry-leading electronics package.
Keeping the machine inline with its competitors, Aprilia is now adding ABS for the 2014 model year , and thus has raised the bar a little higher with its next iteration of the Tuono V4 R. Helping seal the deal is the $14,499 price tag, which is $500 less than last year’s MSRP.
After the serious incident at Silverstone, in which Dani Rivas crashed into Steven Odendaal during the Sunday morning warm up, as Odendaal and other riders stood waiting to make practice starts, the Grand Prix Commission has taken steps to regulate practice starts in all three Grand Prix classes.
From now on, practice starts will only be allowed from designated locations at the circuit, and practice starts elsewhere will be banned.
One question has been raised ahead of nearly every race this season: Is this a Honda track, or is this a Yamaha track? Winners have been predicted based on the perceived characteristics of each circuit. Fast and flowing? Yamaha track. Stop and go? Honda track.
The track record – if you’ll excuse the pun – of such predictions has been little better than flipping a coin, however. Brno was supposed to favor Yamaha, yet Marc Marquez won on a Honda. Misano was clearly a Honda track, yet Jorge Lorenzo dominated on the Yamaha M1. More than Honda vs. Yamaha, the 2013 MotoGP season has been a tale of rider vs. rider, of Jorge Lorenzo vs. Marc Marquez vs. Dani Pedrosa.
So when the paddock rolls up at Aragon, track analysis says this is a Honda track, something underlined by the fact that the last two editions were won by Hondas. With Marc Marquez growing increasingly confident and Dani Pedrosa looking for a return to the winning ways he showed last year, it seems foolish to bet against a Honda rider standing on the top step on Sunday. Yet there are reasons to suspect Pedrosa and Marquez will not have it all their own way this weekend.
During our Broventure, one of the things Tim and I worried while we were off-roading in Moab, Utah was the prospect of a flash flood. With heavy rain storms looming in the distance, and a forecast for afternoon showers in our location, the dry and rocky canyons and river beds that we were riding through were highly susceptible to flash flood conditions. This idea was only reinforced further by the weather alerts from NOAA, and reports of earlier flash floods from local officials
In a trip where we joked about “what could go wrong” on a regular basis, the real prospect of being caught off-guard by a flash flood in a remote location was something very real that could go wrong very quickly. Lucky for us, we were out of the canyons before the rain really started coming down, and the Moab area in general was relatively unaffected by the storms.
Meanwhile in Colorado though, things of course were very different, and it wasn’t until we got home that we could appreciate the full extent of the flooding that was occurring in The Centennial State.
That brings us to this video on YouTube, which shows a man attempting to cross the wash of a flash flood in Boulder, Colorado on his Suzuki DRZ. Things of course start out as well as one can hope, but like any situation with large volumes of moving water, things can get out of hand quite quickly.
Note the speed and intensity shown when the rider first starts fording the water, and how quickly that translates into a lost motorcycle (and phone). This video easily could have become a snuff film, but luckily our protagonist will live to ride another day. Thanks for the tip Gigi!
With four days still on the countdown clock, we didn’t expect to see the 2014 KTM Super Duke 1290 R until its October debut, but those crafty Frenchies at Moto-Station have gotten their hands on a couple photos of Austria’s new street hooligan machine.
Giving us a glimpse into “The Beast’s” final lines, we see that the new KTM Super Duke 1290 R retains the headlight shape from the prototype concept (better seen on the Patriot Edition concept), though sadly does not incorporate Kiska’s underslung GP-style system, opting instead for the standard single-can setup that was seen in the various spy photos that we have shown.
At the EICMA show last year, BMW Motorrad announced that it would make another air-cooled model, in order to commemorate the 90 years that the German OEM has been producing two-wheelers.
Expected to be the production version of the company’s LoRider concept, we got our first taste of what BMW had in store for us with the BMW Concept Ninety — which had its retro goodness co-developed with America’s own Roland Sands.
Now seemingly ready for a true production model, BMW Motorrad has been caught testing the BMW NineT street bike inside the Lake Garda region in Italy.
Obviously fitted with the venerable 1,200cc air-cooled boxer twin that has made the GS and RT such steady steeds, the NineT uses classic motorcycle aesthetics, mated to classic BMW design pieces.