Ducatisti: do you want the good news or the bad news first? The bad news is that the market for motorcycles 500cc and up is down 17% worldwide for the first quarter of this year, which means the “good” news is that Ducati is only down 5% for Q1 2013. Not exactly the start out of the gate that Audi was hoping for its newly acquired two-wheeled brand, but what are you going to do? Western Europe is a mess, with Spain and Italy continuing to go down like a…well, you know. While we don’t enjoy the misery of motorcycle brands, the fact that Ducati Motor Holding is now under the Audi AG umbrella means that we get far more detailed quarterly and yearly reports from the two-wheeled marque, and we’ve got the digits after the jump.
Mission Motors tweeted out something interesting just a moment ago, a link to a new website for Mission Motorcycles. Teasing there a photo of the Mission R, it would seem that the electric superbike that does competitive AMA Supersport lap times at Laguna Seca, is finally set to come to production. It seems we won’t know everything about the new Mission Motorcycles project until June 3rd, though we can speculate pretty accurately on what the A&R Bothan spy network has been telling us. Expect to see the Mission R electric superbike in street legal trim, honed even further than when we rode the machine back in August last year.
Stefan Pierer’s acquisition of Husqvarna continues to baffle me. You will note I say Pierer, and not KTM, bought Husqvarna, since the Austrian CEO used Pierer Industrie AG in the transaction as a means to help side-step European antitrust issues. After all, we can’t have Europe’s largest dirt bike manufacturer, nay largest total motorcycle manufacturer, gobbling up even more brands in the two-wheeled world. But, I digress. Developing three road bikes (Husqvarna Nuda 900, Husqvarna Strada 650, & Husqvarna Terra 650), with three more concepts waiting in the wings (Husqvarna Moab, Husqvarna Baja, & Husqvarna E-G0), it is with even more confusion that we learn that Pierer & Co. intend to kill the Husqvarna Nuda project and its other street siblings.
In case you missed the story last week, Kevin Schwantz is preparing to race in this year’s Suzuka 8-Hour endurance race. For the race, Schwantz will be riding on a team formed by Yukio Kagayama, who in addition to having raced in the MotoGP, World Superbike, and British Superbike Championships, is also a previous Suzuka 8-Hour winner with the Suzuki Endurance Race Team (also joining the three-rider team Noriyuki “Nitro” Haga). Releasing a Q&A about his team’s Suzuka 8-Hour entry, Kagayama-san walks us through how the team came together, what equipment the riders will use, and his outlook on the team’s competitiveness.
A single-cylinder hooligan-maker, the KTM 690 Duke is 330 lbs (curbside without fuel) and 67hp of two-wheeled fun, and we hope that the Austrians bring the KTM 690 Duke R our way as well. While we are on the topic of things missing from KTM’s American line-up, a decent supersport is painfully obvious, yet we can’t see the folks at KTM following the paths of other brands. That’s where our friend Luca Bar comes to mind with his latest concept: the KTM RC4. Using the KTM 690 Duke platform and its LC4 engine, Bar has designed a super-single full-fairing sport bike that takes the Austrian company’s “Ready to Race” DNA and applies it to an idea that is not all that disimilar to the Ducati Supermono.
When I sat down with Claudio Domenicali at the Ducati 1199 Panigale R launch, the now-CEO of Ducati Motor Holding was still just the General Manager of the Italian motorcycle company. Four weeks after our interview though, Gabriele del Torchio would leave Ducati for Alitalia; and Domenicali, a 21-year veteran of both the racing and production departments of Ducati, would take his place at the top of Italy’s most prestigious motorcycle brand. After reading our interview from Austin, Texas after the jump, I think you will agree too.
That Yamaha is working on a seamless gearbox is no secret, with Yamaha’s test riders currently racking up the kilometers around tracks in Japan. Recently, however, Spanish magazine SoloMoto published an article suggesting that Yamaha has already been using its new seamless gearbox since the beginning of the season. My own enquiries to check whether Yamaha was using a seamless gearbox or not always received the same answer: no, Yamaha is not using the seamless gearbox. To test this denial, I went out to the side of the track on Friday morning at Jerez to record the bikes as they went by.
After a very public father/son break-up between Paul Teutul Sr. and Paul Teutul Jr., a steroid-ring scandal involving Paul Sr., and finally a bankruptcy proceeding, it appears that Orange County Choppers is the impossible to kill multi-headed hydra of doom that we all knew it was, as the custom chopper shop is once again headed to the small screen and recruiting some talent, on and off the show. Looking for “someone who will work alongside Paul Senior, running the shop and helping build some of the best custom motorcycles in the world,” OCC says it will be back on television with a new show later this month. Please for the love of god, will someone give this man the attention he craves so dearly??! Or, just shoot us in the face.
We love us some concept bikes here at Asphalt & Rubber, and we have featured more than a few pieces of stunning design and imagination on our pages. Though, we can’t remember the last time one of these works of art were brought to us by a legitimate racing team, but that is what we have here with the Team Alstare Superbike Concept. A nod to the former Suzuki team’s return to the World Superbike Championship as the Ducati factory squad with Carlos Checa and Ayrton Badovini, Alstare has enlisted the help of designer Serge Rusak of Rusak Kreaktive Designworks to ink the shape of its futuristic Superbike concept, while Tryptik Studios handled the 3D modeling prowess.
If you didn’t watch Thursday’s pre-event press conference for MotoGP at Jerez, it is worth a viewing right to the end (assuming you have a MotoGP.com account). Building off the news about the NBA’s Jason Collins coming out as gay in a self-written feature in Sport Illustrated, my good colleague David Emmett had the courage to inquire about the culture and acceptance of the MotoGP paddock for homosexual riders. For the sake of accuracy, after the jump is a full transcript of David’s question, as put to riders Cal Crutchlow, Jorge Lorenzo, Marc Marquez, Andrea Dovizioso, Stefan Bradl, and Scott Redding, as well as those riders’ responses to David’s inquiry.
“Motorcross”? Really? You sound like my Dad in 1973.
uhhh, you tell us about an amazing product, yet no link to where to buy or more info? Does anyone know where to get one of these?
Wow, these are fantastic!
Don’t know how cumbersome they are (though, at first glance, they don’t look to be bad at all), but, if they indeed are negligibly restrictive, the possibilities for amazing videos are truly exciting.
What’s really impressive is how secure (rigid) the connection to the helmet seems to be – any flex between the camera and the helmet is virtually undetectable. You would expect a mounted “stalk” that is designed to be light enough to be unobtrusive to have some flex (bobbing motion relative to the helmet), but there is essentially none of that. Very impressive.
Initially, it actually appears that the riders’/skier’s head movements may be somewhat impeded/limited by the existence of the mount/camera, but, upon reflection, that could easily be just due to the simple fact that the camera’s movement rigidly follows the head movement, i.e., independent head movement is undetectable, as any such movement directly results, due to the rigidity of the mount, a corresponding movement in the camera. You can see the body move around below, which obviously indicates that the head/body interface is behaving rather naturally; yet, due to the unusual nature of the POV, this doesn’t appear very natural. Again, it sort of gives the impression – falsely, I think – of unnatural (hindered – sort of like a person walking with a book balanced on top of her head) motion, but that may just be due to the “new” POV, particularly due the rigidity of connection between the helmet and the camera.
Anyhow, again, impressive.
Ugh, if I knew where to buy one, we’d already have a sportbike video made.
Please put me on the list, because I would like to buy one as well.
Thats F&%king awesome put me on the list I want one… thanks for sharing
fishing pole with a gopro on the end. im on this…
My impression is very different from yours when it comes to these “high quality” consumer video cameras. I have friends with GoPros, and I own a Contour 1080p. I was really excited about the Contour when I bought it, and therefore deluded myself for quite a while that it was actually a decent camera. Eventually I just had to accept reality.
I ride offroad, and grew increasingly disappointed in the quality of the footage the camera was producing. The shaking was horrible, even with the camera mounted to my head. Suspecting that the problem was slop in the mount, I even went so far as to buy an excellent machined aluminum helmet mount from Xtreme Vu, but this only barely helped.
After hours of research into the technical side of things, the problem with these POV cameras became plain as day:
1.) Rolling shutter. Look into it. ALL POV camcorders (and nearly every digital camera and camcorder nowadays) have ditched CCD sensors for CMOS sensors with rolling shutters. Rolling shutters create awful distortions in any clip with lots of motion. PERFECT choice for an “action” camera, right?…
2.) Low bitrate encoding. I get that they want the videos to fit on smaller, more affordable cards, but it’s exactly in fast motion scenes where low bitrate encoding falls flat on its face. Muddy video, macroblocking, pixelation, whatever you want to call it, is all you’re going to see. I fail to see the point in recording a video at 1920×1080 resolution when the results are so muddy and lacking in detail every time there’s motion in the scene that it looks no better than SD video anyway. (When the camera is held still, the detail looks decent.)
3.) No B frames. These cameras encode with just I and P frames, which are less efficient than B frames. So, although it allows for a cheaper processor to handle the encoding, it also leaves less room at a given bitrate for image quality.
4.) .MOV container. Ugh.
Technical issues aside, it was also unfortunate that the camera didn’t even last a year before it went dead and wouldn’t turn on anymore…
Maybe this isn’t the forum for this whining about this issue, but perhaps the POV crowd is reading. I’m far more concerned with being able to buy a decent POV camera than being able to buy novel and interesting mounts for current cameras that suck. If GoPro or Contour read this blog:
Global shutter. At LEAST 24Mbps. B frames. .MTS or .MP4 container. Choice of focal length (maybe replaceable lenses?). Canon currently sells a camcorder out of Costco, the M301, that’ll do all of this except global shutter (although I find my VIXIA’s rolling shutter is WAY less intrusive than the Contour’s), has a ton more features than any POV camera–including touch LCD, easy photo mode, and manual controls and adjustments. It’s hardly bigger or heavier than a Contour and costs only $350. The video it produces DESTROYS anything any POV camera can produce. Ruggedize it and I’d buy one.
Then I’d look for cool helmet mounts!…
I almost yacked in the first couple of minutes.
Is It me, or did I see essentially a bar of a couple of feet in length attached to a mount on the helmet… Is that even safe in case of an accident…?
@ GeddyT
Do you ahve any links to an example of the video quality you are referring too? I am looking into both the GoPro and the Contour, and have not really come to a conclusion which is better, or if at all…
[Recommend] RotoR Camera System – We Can’t Wait to See a Sportbike Movie with One of These…: Asphalt & Rubber wa… http://bit.ly/qbgF4M
Westward, got an email address? I don’t want to bitch too much about a company’s cameras on a totally unrelated blog TOO much! I can fill you in in more detail off this board if you’d like.
Short version, though, is that I haven’t fought this battle in a long time, so don’t have any example clips off the top of my head. You’ll do just as well searching as I can. Just search for “GoPro rolling shutter” or “Contour rolling shutter” or substitute “rolling shutter” with “shaky” or “blurry” in Google. You’ll see what you need to see.
My impression that GoPro has slightly better image quality is purely my observation from looking at clips online. And by slightly, I mean SLIGHTLY. They both suffer from the same issues mentioned above. I think the form factor of the Contour blows GoPro’s out of the water. GoPro cameras just look silly when mounted on a helmet, whereas Contour cameras are very sleek and “tactical.” I didn’t like that there is no LCD on the Contour to set the camera up with (I don’t think the lasers were aligned that well), but sounds like they’ve fixed that with the Contour+. In fact, I’d buy the Contour+ in a heartbeat (even at the high asking price) if they upped the bitrate to 24Mbps at High/4.1 level/profile (B frames). This would require completely new internals, though.