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.
Tomorrow starts the Isle of Man TT — one of the greatest two-wheeled motoring events on this earth. Two weeks of epic motorcycle racing on city streets, if you haven’t been to the TT yet, you really must schedule a trip to meet the Manx. Until you can book those travel plans, we have the next best thing (besides following the TT on A&R, of course): the Isle of Man TT smartphone app.
Motorsport Aftermarket Group (MAG) is probably not a name that many of our readers are familiar with, but it is the company behind brands like Performance Machine wheels, Roland Sands Design, Renthal handlebars, Vance & Hines exhausts, along with a list of other lesser-known aftermarket brands. Straying from its namesake, MAG made some waves recently when it acquired the Motorcycle Superstore online retail outlet.
Another story of interest involves a division of Motorsport Aftermarket Group: the MAG Media Group (MMG), which bought Cycle News back in 2010 and acquired Motorcycle USA with the Motorcycle Superstore purchase. Owning one of the oldest print publications in the business, as well as the largest web-based publication in the industry, MAG has realigned its MMG operations to consolidate the management of the two publications, with longtime editor Paul Carruthers taking on the role of Editorial Director in the business reshuffling.
Not too long ago I gave a presentation at the San Francisco Dainese Store about MotoGP & social media, and one of the interesting points that came up from the discussion was the fact that Casey Stoner did not have a Twitter account. With former-World Champions Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi racking up 400,000 & 600,000 follower respectfully, the current-MotoGP World Champion was voiceless in the online space, which only fueled further the perception that Stoner’s interests in MotoGP resided only with racing on Sunday afternoons.
It may still be the pre-season, but the banter regarding MotoGP on Twitter is certainly getting us ready for the start of the 2012 MotoGP Championship. Sending out a simple infographic this morning with the message, “this picture says it all,” HRC’s official Twitter account posted some interesting statistics that compared Repsol Honda rider Casey Stoner to Ducati Corse’s Valentino Rossi.
Breaking down Stoner’s win percentage over the past five years, the results of course paint an interesting picture. Of course the image “didn’t say it all” as the reaction on Twitter is about what you’d expect from a world widely divided by international boundaries. This of course lead to the image’s immediate removal, but alas nothing truly dies in the digital age.
In case you aren’t already aware, Valentino Rossi is a nine-time World Champion, and also happens to be the favorite son the of MotoGP Championship. Casey Stoner on the other hand…well, the Australian has at best a tumultuous relationship with the public. Naturally, backlash ensued, and HRC finally removed the graphic from its Twitter account.
Asserting that it was all in good fun and simply pointing out some statistics about the last five years, HRC surely was trying to bolster Stoner’s record, and remove the Repsol Honda rider from the “Most Underrated” list in MotoGP — a hard thing to do, even on the heels of a World Championship.
For being a motorcycle mega-brand in his own right, Valentino Rossi has been slow to adapt to this crazy new thing called the internet. A series of tubes, the internet has been a remarkable breakthrough on a variety of levels, changing the paradigm of how we eat, sleep, and waste our lunch breaks at work. Helping teenage girls gossip about their latest crushes, aiding in the massive distribution of pornography to middle-aged men who hide in their basements from their wives and children, and allowing no-talent journalistic hacks to masquerade around as proper motorcycle journalists, there is literally no telling how the internet will change our lives next, and what industries it will turn on their head.
Well get ready for another shockwave ladies and gentlemen, as the G.O.A.T. himself, Valentino Rossi, has hopped on this interweb bandwagon with full 0 & 1 force, first by finally creating his own official website, and now by signing up for a thing called Twitter. Tweeting, twatting, twittering so far in only Italian, Rossi was one of the last hold-outs of MotoGP riders to embrace the micro-blogging service (Randy de Puniet just got on Twitter this week too we might add. Thanks Lauren). Rossi’s move is sure to create a stir with the VR46 crowd, as his legion of fans can now take time out from their busy days of lathering neon yellow paint all of their bodies, and hang onto every one of Rossi’s 140 character messages.
So far, Rossi has tweeted about go-karting, his injured finger, and traveling to Melbourne. We wait with bated breath to see what photo the nine-time World Champion first tweets from his account. Bellissima.
There’s no doubt that Valentino Rossi’s injury at Mugello not only left a hole at Fiat-Yamaha garage, but also created a noticeable void for MotoGP racing as a whole. Perhaps one of the greatest GP racers of all-time, Rossi rarely crashes, and has never been injured so extensively before in his career. And for all the parties involved this incident, it is an untimely disaster that has financial repercussions.
But as the old marketing maxim goes, any press is good press, and with all the coverage that’s surrounded Rossi’s crash, a sizeable amount of “buzz” and media attention has been garnered for the associated parties. What is all that media attention worth? According to internet market research firm eXtrapola, just over 8 million in US dollars (over €6.5 million).
If you haven’t already heard about the TwitGP that took place on Twiegi twitter this weekend, then you missed out on one of the best crowdsourced virtual online racing events ever to take place on the interwebernets. A bit silly, yes. But TwitGP, which came about as a result of the cancelled Japanese GP, was a clever use of modern media and user interactivity that created a humored and enthusiastic approach to twitter and MotoGP. One of the best parts about the TwitGP was the ongoing puns, and fictitious rider quotes that came from people all over the world. We’ve reproduced some of the best after the jump, enjoy.
By now you’ve surely heard the news that the Japanese GP at Motegi has been cancelled because of the volcanic ash the continues to spew out of an unpronounceable mountain in Iceland. With teams unable to fly out of Europe and into Japan, Dorna had no choice but to postpone the event until much later in the season.
Leaving MotoGP fans with nothing to do this weekend except watch the confirmed WSBK stop at Assen, some clever individuals have turned to the internet to get their GP fix. Enter TwitGP, the first virtual sporting event, that’s being hosted on twitter. With a bevy of twitter-based wordplay, TwitGP has seen a number of tweeps get on-board with the concept, which hopes to bring racing action straight to 4,000 or twitter followers come Sunday.
There is no doubt at this point that Harley-Davidson needs to engage new markets and customers in order for the company to continue to succeed. Along this vein, the Milwaukee brand recently retained the services of Sassenbach Advertising to help push the biker message out onto the internet. With virtually no budget, a computer, and a webcam, the German ad agency engaged over 170,000 people per week with the Harley-Davidson brand message “Sorry I’m on the Road” on Chatroulette, the latest internet craze.
Editor’s Note: This guest post by David Emmett was originally posted on his site MotoMatters under the title of “Editor’s Blog: Old And New – How Media Is Changing”. We thought Emmett was so on-point with his assessment of the use of the internet and social media in motorcycle racing, and the industry as a whole, that we asked him to reproduce his post here on Asphalt & Rubber. To put his post in complete context, Emmett just finished working this weekend as Fiat-Yamaha’s live blogger during the Qatar GP, where he wrote, tweeted, and hustled his way around the MotoGP paddock as the only online journalist with a permanent Dorna press pass. For more of an account of his time in Qatar, and for all your other racing news needs, you should visit his site at MotoMatters.com (after first reading Asphalt & Rubber first of course).
The comment that I have probably received most since I started this blog was “I want your job!” And frankly, I have to pinch myself to see if this is still all really happening, so it is a sentiment I can completely understand. Being allowed to work in the MotoGP paddock and up in the press room feels like a genuine privilege, and being surrounded with people who share the same passion is truly remarkable.
I often wonder at how this all came about. Just over four years ago, I posted a season preview on the Adventure Rider motorcycle forum, and now, I learned today, I am the first journalist from an online publication ever to receive a permanent pass from Dorna. In the intervening years I have worked hard both to keep learning as much as I can about racing, and communicate my passion for the sport to a wider audience. It has cost me blood, sweat, tears, and more money than I like to think about, but all these would have been to no avail if it wasn’t for one factor: The Internet.
