I’m going to start the 2nd and final part of my 2014 photo retrospective with the image above of Marc Marquez. Taken at Woodcote during Sunday mornings warm up for the British Grand Prix at Silverstone.
Woodcote was one of the most exhilarating sections of track I shot last year. The sensation of speed as the riders came past, back wheel sliding, only feet away was indescribable.
Aprilia USA will be part of MotoAmerica’s inaugural season, as the US subsidiary of the Italian brand confirmed an officially supported entry into the MotoAmerica Superstock 1000 class.
To go racing, Aprilia has partnered with HSBK Racing to form the “Aprilia HSBK Racing” team, which will campaign a two-rider lineup on the 2015 Aprilia RSV4 Factory superbike. The names of the riders have not been released as of yet.
HRC unveiled its factory MotoGP team this weekend in Bali, Indonesia — giving us our first glimpse of the Repsol Honda livery for the 2015 season.
Both Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa were in attendance, which is no surprise considering how important the Indonesian market is for Honda.
The Indonesian unveil also helps the two GP riders to have only a short hop now to Malaysia, to start the MotoGP season with the first official test a Sepang International Circuit.
As for the 2015-spec RC213V, things remain mostly the same to the layman’s eye. Red Bull’s sponsoring and support of both Pedrosa and Marquez, as well as the Repsol Honda team, is more prominent, and displayed on the belly pan fairing of the bike.
We’ll let you play spot the differences in the photos after the jump, they are super-sized high-resolution shots, so they might take a minute to load. Enjoy!
If you were on Asphalt & Rubber this weekend, you probably noticed that I switched the commenting system from WordPress’ basic system to Disqus’ more advanced commenting engine.
All previous comments should be imported now, and I hope there are relatively few bugs to reports. Hopefully this will mean a more engaged commenting section, since Disqus handles threaded comments more properly, and has already a good community following.
The slight downside is that some of our loyal commenters will have to register with the Disqus service, though that shouldn’t be too much of an issue since it is a very reputable one, and they won’t spam you once you register.
A bit of a formality, since rider John McGuinness already spilled the beans in December last year, but Team Mugen has confirmed its entry into the 2015 Isle of Man TT.
Mugen will have a new bike at the contest, named the Shinden Yon, “Yon” being “four” in Japanese, and the bike being the company’s fourth TT racer — like its lap times, Mugen’s engineers are very consitent with their naming conventions.
Little is known about the Shinden Yon, and Mugen is saying only that the machine is “newly developed to improve over last year’s model.”