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Last weekend I attended my first race meeting since 2019, shooting photography at the final round of the 2021 British Superbike Championship, at the iconic Brands Hatch circuit.

Interestingly enough, British Superbikes at Brands Hatch in 2008 was the first event I attended with a media pass outside of the Isle of Man.

That particularly weekend didn’t go very well after heavy overnight snow on Saturday brought about the cancellation of racing. The organizers did manage to reschedule the race weekend later in the year, which I attended but I haven’t been back to Brands Hatch since.

When the Isle of Man government started to relax the islands COVID border restriction this year, I decided I was going to try and make it to a round of the British Superbike Championship.

Plans to attend a couple of early rounds didn’t come-off for various reason, so I decided to go to Brands Hatch for the culmination of the BSB Showdown.

It is easy to peg the Aprilia Tuono 660 as simply the “naked version” of the fully faired Aprilia RS 660 sport bike, but the more and more I think about this Italian middleweight-twin, I feel that distinction is a misleading way to regarding the smaller Tuono.

The better way to think about the Aprilia Tuono 660 is to regard it as Aprilia’s road-focused 660 offering, whereas the RS 660 is geared more towards track enthusiasts.

As one can see, the Aprilia Tuono 660 doesn’t really have a lack of fairing, just more of a bikini approach, in contrast to the RS 660’s one-piece design.

For the 2021 model year, the venerable Aprilia RSV4 gets another update to its 13-year-old platform.

The RSV4 has evolved considerably in that timeframe, and over that period, this production motorcycle lays claim to being the first with an IMU, the first with ride-by-wire, and the first with winglets.

While the differences between the model years of the RSV4 can be subtle at times, the 2021 model sees a revamp of the superbike’s aesthetic, especially in terms of how it handles aerodynamics.

When we first got to get up-close with the Honda CBR1000RR-R Fireblade SP, it was a hastened affair. Honda Motor Europe invited the world’s press to see the model at its EICMA debut, and then hired security guards to keep us away from it. Bizzare.

Now, almost a year later, we finally get to a proper face-to-face with this new Fireblade, thanks to American Honda’s ride debut at Thunderhill Raceway (read our full review here).

With only the top trim level coming to the United States, Honda creates an interesting situation with the Fireblade SP – one that we will explore in the next day or two with our A&R Pro readers, but both bikes share the same core features.

Swinging a lens for us at the British GP, photographer Tony Goldsmith gives us a glimpse of the MotoGP action at Silverstone.

Photos: © 2019 Tony Goldsmith / www.tonygoldsmith.co.uk – All Rights Reserved

Swinging a lens for us at the British GP, photographer Tony Goldsmith gives us a glimpse of the MotoGP action at Silverstone.

While much was made of the track’s issues with wet weather last year, for 2019 the talk is all about the heat and the sun. Let’s hope Sunday’s race has the same intensity as the weather.

For a brief moment, the Yamaha Factory Racing Team was a five-time winner (in a row, I might add) at the Suzuka 8-Hours endurance race.

That reality was eventually snatched away by the FIM Endurance World Championship race direction officials, who this weekend learned something new about their rulebook, but the race run by the factory-backed Yamaha team was no less impressive.

For nearly eight hours, the team’s three riders (Alex Lowes, Michael van der Mark, and Katsuyuki Nakasuga) kept in check the best efforts by the Kawasaki Racing Team and Red Bull Honda squads, and it wasn’t until the final stint that Alex Lowes lost track of a raging Jonathan Rea.

Race day at the Suzuka 8-Hours has no shortage of pageantry. The crown jewel in the FIM Endurance World Championship, the Suzuka 8-Hours might be the most important race in all of motorcycling, and it certainly holds that distinction in Japan.

With all that said, this year’s edition was truly a spectacle, as the three factory teams from Honda, Kawasaki, and Yamaha fought in close-quarters the entire race, giving fans quite the treat.

With a few seconds or less between them for almost the entire eight-hour race, we saw no shortage of passes and strategy, making this a race well-worth watching.

Photos: © 2019 Steve English – All Rights Reserved

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Photos: © 2019 Andrew Kohn / Asphalt & Rubber – All Rights Reserved