Taking advantage of a quasi-home round for the MotoGP Championship at the German GP, Austrian company KTM debuted it latest “ready to race” machine, the 2013 KTM Moto3 250 GPR production race bike. A for-sale-version of its Moto3 Championship contender, the KTM Moto3 250 GPR borrows heavily from its GP-class predecessor, though comes in a slightly lower state of tune.

Featuring forged aluminum OZ wheels instead of magnesium ones, the production racer also comes sans Brembo brakes and WP suspension (items race teams would likely get from suppliers separately anyways). There is however one big technical difference, as KTM has reduced the bike’s maximum engine speed to 13,500 rpm, down from the 14,000 found on the factory bikes. This leaves the 2013 KTM Moto3 250 GPR production racer with just under 50hp on tap.

Bold and fearless or brash and ill-advised? There was a lot of that sort of thing at the Sachsenring on Sunday, in all three classes. (Spoiler Alert — Ed.) The most obvious example begging that question was what would have been Casey Stoner’s last-corner lunge past Dani Pedrosa, had it not gone horribly wrong as he lined the pass up the corner before. We’ll come to that later, but with a Moto3 race run in drying conditions and a Moto2 race where one of the favorites had to start from well down on the grid, there were plenty more to choose from.

With the rainy weekend turning to cloudy but dry skies, racing for the German GP proved to be a challenge as teams had only one practice session plus the warm-up to get their dry-setups right for the afternoon’s race. With Casey Stoner sitting on the pole-position, all eyes were on the Australian to see if he could convert the front-row start into a points advantage in the MotoGP Championship, after Lorenzo’s crash in Assen leveled the points between the two rivals.

The level playing field was courtesy of one over-zealous Alvaro Bautista, whose first-turn crash at Assen took the factory Yamaha rider down with him, thus negating his 25 point lead in the 2012 MotoGP Championship. With much of silly season still undecided, the focus wasn’t just on the riders at the front, as Ben Spies, Andrea Dovizioso, and Cal Crutchlow all are vying for the last factory seat in the Yamaha garage. As the German GP would prove, even with half of the season nearly over, it could all come down to the last minute. Click on for a full race report with spoilers.

It poured at the Sachsenring on Saturday afternoon. It absolutely hosed down, rivulets of water running across the track to make the conditions treacherous. Ideal conditions for Ducati, you would say, given their form so far this year in the wet, with Valentino Rossi on the podium in the downpour at Le Mans, and a 1-2 during the first session of free practice at a drenched Silverstone. But Nicky Hayden is 7th and Valentino Rossi 9th, a second or more off the pace of pole-sitter Casey Stoner. What went wrong?

With a mixture of wet and dry conditions occurring during the race-week for MotoGP at Sachsenring, qualifying for the German GP was a strictly rainy affair. The great equalizer, the rain proved to throw a wrench in the usual procession of riders, as MotoGP gets ready for its second round of three back-to-back race-weekends.

Adding drama to the event was the deadlock in the 2012 MotoGP Championship between Jorge Lorenzo and Casey Stoner, as Alvaro Bautista took out the Spaniard in the first corner of the Dutch TT. For his crimes against Spanish supremacy, Bautista will start from the back of the grid, regardless of his qualifying effort today.

Silly Season has hit full swing in Germany, not just for the MotoGP class but for the support classes as well. And while movements in MotoGP are mainly about what is happening next year, in Moto2 and Moto3 – and even among the CRT machines – there is some serious rider swapping going on for the rest of this season.

In MotoGP, the next two key movements just got a lot closer. Dani Pedrosa is now very close to staying with the Repsol Honda team, telling Spanish journalists that he would sign a new two-year contract with HRC either here in the Sachsenring or at Mugello at the latest. His priority had been to stay on a bike he felt he could win with, telling the Spanish newspaper ABC earlier this week that Honda and Yamaha had been his only realistic options. The Ducati, he said rather pointedly, was more something a rider might consider before their retirement.

Ducati test rider Franco Battaini has been tapped to take the place of Cardion AB Ducati’s Karel Abraham, who injured his hand during at crash at the Catalunya test. Sitting out the British GP and Dutch TT, Abraham will also be unfit to ride at Sachsenring, thus causing his team to have to find a replacement rider.

This last news is just one of many blows to Abraham’s season, as the 2012 MotoGP Championship has been a rough one for the young Czech rider, who with a bevy of crashes, has only finished in the points once.

The German round of MotoGP is to stay at the Sachsenring circuit until 2016. Dorna announced today that they had signed a five-year deal with the ADAC, who own the Sachsenring, to keep the race at the circuit. The race had been under threat earlier, after projected losses for the German GP meant that circuit feared not being able to afford the event.

After seeing the production schedule of the Horex VR6 pushed back several times now (let’s not even mention the DOA-status of the supercharged version of the bike), it looks like the revival of the German brand is nearly ready for primetime, as Horex has released a video of the VR6 scooting about (sans its triple-pipe exhaust). The aptly named Horex VR6 features a 15° VR-shaped six-cylinder motor, which with its 1,218cc displacement produces a stout 161 bhp.

Built with classic roadster styling, Horex has been tight-lipped on the bike’s pricing, though we expect that it will be well north of $20,000 when it reaches American shores. While we’ve already heard the supercharged Horex testing on the company’s engine dyno, this is the first we’re heard from the naturally aspirated model. Check it out after the jump, and let us know if you think it was worth the wait.

We probably would have posted this video out of sheer Star Wars geekdom, but a 7min 10sec lap around the Nürburgring Nordschleife (BTG) is also nothing to scuff at as well. Such is the accomplishment of Andy Carlile, a 33-year-old Englishman living in Germany who was on a mission to be the fastest on two-wheels around the ‘Ring.

Setting the record on street-legal Dunlop rubber, perhaps the only thing more impressive than Carlile’s lap time is his feat of keeping the squirrely but otherwise mostly stock and street-legal 2005 Yamaha YZF-R1 at bay, as the video shows the massive movement of the bike on braking and acceleration. Jedi mind trick for sure.