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Video: A Different Kind of Race in Dakar

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With the Dakar Rally a little over halfway through its 32nd running, the historic race has yet to show a decisive winner between the Despres/Coma grudge match. Shifting from its African namesake in 2009 because of safety concerns, the rally now takes place in South America instead. Some fans of The Dakar lament this change, citing various reasons for their desire to see the race continue on African soil, but beyond sentimental reasons, I would wager this year’s venues of Argentina, Chile, and Peru provide just as stunning and challenging of a course as the old Paris to Dakar route ever did.

I have done my fair share of traveling through this job and my previous lives, but for some reason I have yet to step foot onto the African soil, which is something I hope to change this year. Thinking about the landscapes I grew up watching during the “original” Dakar, Africa seems every bit the National Geographic adventure I believe it to be, and of course the Boy Scout in me would cherish a night under the African savanna’s sky.

Continuing a vein we have been exploring this week though, the motorcycle culture in Africa is something entirely different to our Americanized perspective on motorcycling. Often the more reliable means of transportation between cities and villages, I have partially gotten to know motorcycles in Africa through my experience with the folks from Riders for Health, but the cultural element to this is something I have yet to truly understand. Maybe this music video for Parachute Youth gets us all a little bit closer to that understanding, and in the process brings us back to where we ourselves started on two wheels as well. Thanks for the tip Q$-Bling!

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News

Site News: Asphalt & Rubber Is Now on Google+

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You may have already noticed the Google+ “+1” buttons on the site, as lately we’ve been playing around with the social networking service here at Asphalt & Rubber. It took the internet search behemoth a while to roll out pages for sites like A&R, but we’ve finally gotten our Google+ page up, and had some time to populate it with articles and such.

An alternative to website’s like Facebook, Google+ most notably lets you share and connect with other users based on your social circles, e.g. you can select to share articles from A&R only with your motorcycling friends (sparring your non-motorcycle friends from your two-wheeled addiction). So, if Google+ is your social network of choice, be sure to follow us on there to get your daily motorcycle fix, and “+1” any articles you wish to share.

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Racing

New Ducati Desmosedici GP12 is 90% New Says Preziosi – But Will It Be an L-Four?

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On what typically would be the formal unveiling of Ducati’s next GP race bike, Ducati Corse General Manager Filippo Preziosi stood alone on the stage at Madonna di Campiglio, and instead talked briefly about the “totally new” GP12, while fielding questions from the assembled press. Releasing very little information about the team’s off-season progress, Preziosi shared very few concrete details about the new Ducati Desmosedici GP12 (you could also read that sentence to mean that the assembled press failed to press for more detailed information concerning the GP12…it really could go either way). From what information could be gleaned from Preziosi, we now know that that the new GP12 is comprised of roughly 90% new parts when compared the previous iterations of the MotoGP contender.

Expected visually to look similar the GP12’s of the past, the finalized GP12 will have an aluminum perimeter-style frame, carbon fiber swingarm, and a better balance with the motor placement. Declining to state the angle of the cylinder heads, Preziosi added some more fuel to the fire and speculation that the Ducati Desmosedici GP12 will not have a 90° cylinder arrangement. At the very least, the GP12 will allow for greater adjustment with the engine placement specs, as well as the overall geometry of the motorcycle. This should help Ducati Corse develop the GP12 over the course of the season, and set it up better for each race circuit. However, Preziosi did caution that the team was trying to compress two years worth of R&D into three months, a daunting task to say the least.

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Banter

Video: Traffic in Ho Chi Minh City

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Fresh off the awesome truck, this time-lapse video seems apropos to our earlier discussion regarding motorcycling in Southeast Asia. A short film featuring tens of thousands of photographic stills, photographer Rob Whitworth has not only managed to capture the dense urban nature of Ho Chi Minh City but has also found a way to translate it into a very eye-catching depiction. It’s part chaos, it’s part art. It’s all Vietnam. Video & 18 stills after the jump, while a more detail Q&A on the project can be found at WORD HCMC.

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Banter

Do You Have 20/20 Vision?

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Because motorcycles can move from lane to lane with ease, and even vary their position in a single lane with regularity, motorcyclists are sadly hard to spot when automobile drivers are accustomed only to looking out for larger slow-to-move cars that take up an entire lane’s width. Yes, as motorcyclists we impose a special duty on automobile drivers, a duty which more often than not gets pushed back onto us. This then requires motorcyclists to ride defensively. It requires us to assume a cage doesn’t see us, and is gong to move into our lane.

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Racing

Photo: The Aprilia Moto2 Racer that Never Was

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Aprilia’s bid to race in the Moto2 Championship was apparently very short-lived, as Italian moto site Infomoto2 has uncovered a photo of the project, that is of course before Piaggio executives killed the racing effort. Hoping to continue the brand’s domination in the middle-class of GP racing, Aprilia’s Moto2 effort surely suffered from the fact that a Honda CBR motor would reside inside the Italian company’s prototype machine. The conflict of interest is surely understandable, although admittedly Aprilia had no 600cc motor of its own to use for the Moto2 class. Still, a piece of “what could have been” racing history, if you squint hard enough you can see some of Aprilia’s other GP racing efforts in the bike’s design.

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Opinion/Editorial

Lawless Jakarta & Some Thoughts About Southeast Asia

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Here’s a random factoid delivered in the form of a question for you: when looking at the metrics for the , which city do you think is responsible for the most readers? We are an American-based website after all, so your top picks might be New York, Los Angeles, or maybe San Francisco, right? Nope. Half our traffic does come from abroad though, so maybe London? Paris? Rome? Barcelona? Wrong again dear readers, because when it comes to a single city consuming the moto-goodness that we publish on a daily basis, none of them have anything on Jakarta, Indonesia (yes, the title of article gave that one away, huh?).

I recently talked about this phenomenon with another online motojournalist, who was experiencing the same trend, and he concluded that it must be employees using proxy servers so they can read blog while at work. I disagreed however, and when looking at where the industry as a whole is currently headed, I think there is something much more basic at play here. Developing countries are the future of motorcycling, and right now Southeast Asia is a hot bed of growth for motorcycle sales. With a less developed infrastructure, and still a need to get from Point A to Point B, motorcycles provide a cheap and effective means of transportation in countries like Indonesia, and for many, motorcycles have become a way of life.

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Racing

MotoGP: Ducati Corse Will Have “Totally New” Bike for 2012

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Ducati Corse’s winter break is finally over, as the Italian MotoGP squad has assembled in Madonna di Campiglio for Wrooom 2012, the team’s season kick-off party jointly held with Ferrari’s F1 contingency. Traditionally the ski-filled week-long media event involves interviews with the riders, an unveiling of the Ducati race bike, and a technical briefing, but this year is a little different.

With nary a Ducati Desmosedici GP12 to be found, today’s interviews, with both Valentino Rossi and Nicky Hayden, explained the current state of Ducati Corse, and set the expectations for the 2012 MotoGP season. Announcing that a new Ducati race bike had been designed (apparently existing only in the computers of the Italian company), the team is optimistic about its chances, but also cautious about it’s likely results, especially early on in the season.

Hopping to make forward-progress on Honda and Yamaha at the Sepang test later this month, Ducati’s focus is to make logical steps on its competition, and hopes that its new GP12 (we’re not even going to hazard a guess at it’s internal designation), provides the answers on track that the team struggled to find last season.

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Bikes

1979 Honda CB650 by Trillion Industries

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Here at Asphalt & Rubber, we don’t feature too many bikes that subscribe to the “modern-take on the retro look” hipster theory of motorcycling. Maybe it’s because we prefer to go fast rather than look cool, or maybe it’s because we don’t own any form fitting denim pants — honestly, it could go either way on that one. That being said, we know what we like, and more importantly when know what we like when we see it, and that pretty much sums up our thoughts on the 1979 Honda CB650 by Trillion Industries.

Beginning life in the mundane, the Honda CB is a crowd favorite with the retro-turned-hipster crowd for making modern takes on the café racer design aesthetic. Don’t get us wrong, we have seen plenty of café racers that we like, and the market segment enjoys a small but militant following of motorcycle enthusiasts. However, rarely does a Honda CB, no matter how much beauty school it has attended, floor you in your seat. This work by Derek Pauletto however, would be the exception to that statement.

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Rumors

Rumor: Ducati 799 Supersport for 2013?

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Now that the 2012 model year motorcycles have debuted (though we still expect a few mid-year releases), the speculation can now begin for the 2013 model year machines. Wasting no time in this process, the Italian press is afire with rumors of a Ducati 799 superbike model to compliment the recently released Ducati 1199 Panigale.

A rumor of this nature, this early in the year, is certainly an interesting one. There should be little debate over the fact that Borgo Panigale has a supersport variant of the 1199 superbike already figured out, tested, & ready for prime time, and our Bothan spies confirm just as much to us. The details of such a bike though, now that’s where the devil resides.

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News

BMW Motorrad Had Its Best All-Time Sales in 2011

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The BMW Group has released its 2011 sales numbers, and the results for BMW Motorrad are very impressive indeed. Posting its best yearly sales figures ever in the brand’s nearly 90-year history, BMW Motorrad surpassed its previous high-water mark, set in 2007, of 102,467 units by selling 104,286 units in 2011 (Q1, Q2, & Q3).

Accordingly, sales for 2011 were up 6.4% over 2010, which saw the brand sell 98,047 units last year. Helping spur that sales growth was BMW Motorrad’s strong performance in December 2011, as the German motorcycle manufacturer delivered 4,232 units worldwide in the last month of the year alone, a 12.4% increase over sales in December 2010.

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