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March 2014

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It has been a long and confusing wait for the 2014 MotoGP season to begin. An awful lot has happened since the MotoGP bikes were rolled into their packing crates after the Valencia test and shipped back to the factories and workshops from whence they came. There have been shock announcements, shock testing results, and shock training crashes.

There have been last-minute rule changes, made in an attempt to keep all of the different factions in the paddock from rebelling. The final rules for the premier class were only announced on Monday, and even then, they still contain sufficient ambiguity to confuse.

But this confusion and chaos cannot disguise the fact that 2014 looks set to be the most intriguing championship in years. Gone are the reviled CRT machines – unjustly reviled; though slow, they were still jewels of engineering prowess – and in their place is a new class of machinery, the Open entries.

A simpler demarcation has been made, between factories running their own software on the spec Magneti Marelli ECU, and the Open teams using the championship software supplied and controlled by Dorna.

The latest rule change adds a twist, allowing underperforming Ducati all the benefits of the Open class – 24 liters of fuel instead of 20, 12 engines per season instead of 5, unlimited testing and a softer tire – until they start winning races. But the 2014 grid looks much more like a single coherent class than the pack of racing motorcycles that lined up last year.

After locking down Movistar with a five-year title sponsor contract, Yamaha has had to go back and re-shoot its 2014 MotoGP livery. That’s just fine by us, as we love any excuse to get high-resolution photos of GP bikes. The changes to the paint on the 2014 Yamaha YZR-M1 isn’t as dramatic as we thought it would be though, with Yamaha fitting the Movistar logos into its already existing layout.

At least this time around we get some professional looking photos for your viewing pleasure (the ones from Indonesia look like they were shot in a utility closet), though there must have been a rush to get them out as the color correction is a bit off, and you can spot some Photoshop artifacts in a couple photos. Still, with the 2014 MotoGP Championship about get underway in day’s time, we aren’t complaining…too much.

Our friends to the north are reporting that the Yamaha MT-07, the two-cylinder compatriot to the Yamaha MT-09 triple, is headed to Canada. Canada Moto Guide is reporting that the now called Yamaha FZ-07 will be available in Canada come the spring time, and will sport a $7,299 MSRP (CAD).

Like the FZ-09, the FZ-07 is a real value motorcycle from Yamaha. 74hp and 50 lbs•ft of torque, the Yamaha FZ-07 features a 270-degree crank, on a 689cc parallel-twin lump, and tips the scales at 395 lbs wet weight, with 3.69 gallon fuel tank.

After a week of debate and discussion, the Grand Prix Commission has finally reached an agreement on the Factory 2 class. It took many hours of phone calls, and full agreement was not reached until late on Monday afternoon, but the agreement contains some significant changes to the long-term future of the MotoGP championship.

The Factory 2 proposal has been adopted in a slightly modified guise, with any manufacturer entering in the Open class liable to lose fuel and soft tires should they win races. But the bigger news is that the full MotoGP class will switch to use the spec software and ECU from the 2016 season, a year earlier than expected.

The proposals adopted by the GPC now lays out a plan for MotoGP moving forward to 2016. In 2014 and 2015, there will be only two categories – Open and Factory Option – with the set of rules agreed at the end of last year.

The new proposal sees manufacturers without a dry weather win in three years to compete as Factory Option entries, but with all of the advantages of the Open class – more fuel, more tires, no engine freeze and unlimited testing. However, should they start to achieve success, they will start to lose first fuel, and then the soft tires.

If Ducati – for it is mainly Ducati to which these rules apply, as they are currently the only manufacturer who are eligible at the moment – score 1 win, 2 second place finishes or 3 third places during dry races, then all bikes entered by Ducati will have their fuel cut from 24 to 22 liters for each race.

Should Ducati win 3 races in the dry, they will also lose use of the softer rear tires which the Open category entries can use. If Ducati were to lose the extra fuel or tires during 2014, they would also have to race under the same conditions in 2015.

Chances are that if you are a regular Asphalt & Rubber reader, that means you are a pretty tech savvy person. So first of all, congratulations on your choice to get your motorcycle news and opinions in digital form, rather than waiting three months for the print guys to get their act together. Huzzah!

Of course, this also means that you have had to suffer through the endless onslaught of “Top 5” lists that have inundated motorcycle “journalism” the past year or so. I’m pretty sure that in a few years, we will look back at the whole BuzzFeedification of news as the second worst idea to hit motorcycle journalism, right behind the idea of a content paywall — but I digress.

That being said, I did want to share with our A&R readers five apps that I use on my iPhone everyday, that maybe you haven’t stumbled upon. So in the interest of  better living through technology and all that jazz, I’ve created my own little Top 5 list — Yes, I’ve died a little bit on the inside because of this article.

Hopefully though there are couple apps on my list that you haven’t heard of, which will cause the overlap of your Venn diagram of “motorcycles” and “technology” to grow just a little bit more, and those make my personal ethical sacrifice worthwhile.

I realize in advance that this list leans towards iOS users. I’m hoping commenters will leave a few apps in the comments section that I might have missed (especially on other platforms), so we can spread the love around.

Did you miss this weekend’s Daytona 200? It wasn’t on TV, but instead was streamed on DMG’s new website: FansChoice.tv. The content was pretty standard, for anyone who has watched AMA Pro Racing’s TV commentary before, though it was without a high-defition feed, which irked video snobs like us.

Some readers reported other technical difficulties with the steam itself, though for the large-part of viewers, things seemed to work ok. The only probably up until now, is how to watch the Daytona 200 and other races if you didn’t catch them live. DMG has a fix for that now as well: YouTube.

Yamaha has setup a teaser website, complete with countdown clock, for a new motorcycle(s) that should break cover next week. With just over eight days on the clock, at the time of this writing, we won’t have to wait long as we speculate to what Yamaha is brewing for us.

The general consensus so far is that we will see the Yamaha YZF-R25 and Yamaha YZF-R3 twin-cylinder sport bikes, which should come in either 250cc or 300cc formats, depending on which country we are talking about. Yamaha teased us with the YZR-R25 concept at the Tokyo Motor Show, and recent trademark filings in the United States and Europe have tipped off the YZF-R3 model.

From Yamaha’s teaser video we get a quick line drawing and head-on render of a sport bike, which looks very close to the R25 model we saw in Tokyo, which helps fuel the small-displacement sport bike fire further. Also seen in the video is some sort of urban maxi-scooter, along with its presumably accompanying engine. More details as we get it.

If you wanted proof that things are changing at Ducati, you need look no further than the launch of their MotoGP team.

In years past, it was an outrageously flamboyant affair, a veritable extravaganza hosted by Philip Morris to showcase their two motor sports projects, the Ducati MotoGP team and the Ferrari Formula One squad.

Held at the upmarket Italian ski resort of Madonna di Campiglio, the event even had a proper showbiz name: Wrooom. All that was missing was an exclamation mark.

Ducati’s 2014 launch was very different. Held not in Italy, but in Munich and Ingolstadt, on premises owned and operated by Ducati’s current owners, Audi.

The team presentation at the Audi Forum at Munich airport, the unveiling of the livery in the evening, at the Audi Gebrauchtwagen Plus center in Munich, then to Audi headquarters in Ingolstadt the following day, for the presentation of the Germany company’s annual report to the press.

If the Wrooom event had been flamboyant and over the top, the 2014 launch was serious, focused, yet still stylish. It felt very much like Italy versus Germany, and Germany won.

There was another difference too. Despite the media having been present at both Sepang tests and the Phillip Island tire test, there was still some real meat for journalists to get their teeth into in Munich.

Ducati Corse boss Gigi Dall’Igna, MotoGP project leader Paolo Ciabatti, Ducati CEO Claudio Domenicali, head of technical development at Audi Ulrich Hackenberg, even the riders Andrea Dovizioso and Cal Crutchlow all had something new to add. It was much, much more interesting than expected.

It has been ten days since Carmelo Ezpeleta announced to an unsuspecting world that a new category would be added to the MotoGP class to contain Ducati, the ‘Factory 2’ class.

The change was to be ratified on Tuesday, 11th March, in a telephone meeting of the Grand Prix Commission, and Ezpeleta was confident that it would go through without too many problems.

Tuesday came and went, and no agreement had been reached. In fact, it has taken all week and much of this weekend for the situation to approach a resolution.

Sources with knowledge of the situation have now confirmed that an agreement will be announced on Monday, allowing the rules to be set in place for the start of the season on Thursday, March 20th.

One of the more compelling designs we have seen grace our pixels lately, today’s concept sketch is by young automotive designer Steven Galpin, and harkens back to when MotoGP racer Valentino Rossi was still a part of Ducati Corse’s GP program.

Imagining a special edition version of the Ducati 1199 Panigale, a bike whose “frameless” monocoque chassis is based off the Ducati Desmosedici race bike, Galpin has smoothed out the lines of the Italian superbike, creating something entirely different, though clearly related to the Panigale.

A quick glance at Galpin’s drawings, and you may be wondering where the Ducati’s underslung exhaust has gone (it’s a noticeable hole on the bike’s clean lines). We suggest you train your eye onto the concept’s swingarm, as an integrated exhaust has been added to the single-sided swingarm.

Galpin’s work is intriguing, and should satiate some of the issues that people have had with the Panigale’s busy bodywork; however, the Ducati VR|46 brings its own criticisms as well (we’re not so sure about its 2018 delivery date either). Overall though, we like what Galpin has done here — sometimes less is more. Thanks for the tip Nik!

In honor of fallen off-road legend Kurt Caselli, the foundation named after him in conjunction with Red Tide Pictures, has decided to produce a movie about his life and stellar racing career.

Taken tragically on November 15, 2013 while competing in the Baja 1000, Caselli is a rider who will not quickly be forgotten, leaving behind a legacy and a stamp on the hearts of those who knew him.