This weekend marks the return of Grand Prix Motorcycle racing to the South American continent, and the MotoGP paddock is…
The folks at Ronax are certainly getting away with not saying much, especially when it comes to their soon-to-be-released Ronax 500 motorcycle. Dressed in a neon yellow cover, limited to only 46 units, and looking suspiciously similar thru the sheet to a Honda NSR500, what Ronax isn’t saying is that its creation is a replica of Valentino Rossi’s last two-stroke race bike (the Honda NSR500), but they are certainly doing everything in their power to convey that very fact. The last man to win a GP championship on a 500cc two-stroke machine, Valentino Rossi is of course a crowd favorite – and using his name and history, without actually using it, is a clever (though modestly unethical) way of selling some bikes.
One of the benefits of having contacts in the MotoGP paddock is occasionally getting info that comes in handy. At…
You may remember the Yamaha PED1 and Yamaha PES1 electric motorcycle concepts, which the tuning fork brand debuted at the Tokyo Motor Show last year. Modest, yet slightly futuristic looking, the overall impression we got from readers was that Yamaha was onto something with its PED1 and PES1 bikes, and it seems the Japanese OEM has heard your excitement. Announcing plans in its 2013 Annual Report to bring the PED1 and PES1 to market by 2016, Yamaha is yet another major OEM to jump on the electric bandwagon and add legitimacy to this budding powertrain segment.
The Argentinian round of MotoGP will be the first time a major racing series has visited the Termas de Rio…
Since Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005 as a means to “combat our growing energy problems” and “reduce our independence on oil”, the debate over how safe ethanol additives really are has raged on. As you may know, the Act lead the introduction of E10, which vehicle owners have been claiming causes serious damage to engines, such as damaged catalytic converters, improper combustion, and component deterioration. While proponents of ethanol claim that it is a cleaner burning, higher octane fuel source that is renewable, opponents feel that the mixture of gasoline and ethanol is causing more problems than it is solving. This week marks a victory for the latter camp, as the EPA has now publicly confirmed that ethanol does cause serious damage the engines.