It is always interesting to see what motorcycle engineers work on in their spare time. Sometimes its motorcycle related, and sometimes their inspiration goes down a completely different path. Luckily for us, in the case of Bottpower’s David Sánchez, the Spanish engineer’s very limited free time stayed within the two-wheeled realm. A project spanning 11 years, Sánchez started his design with a Honda CBR954RR engine as the centerpiece, and built from there. Employing a Hossack-style trellis for the front-end, and a matching steal trellis chassis (in orange, naturally), Sánchez has picked up the nearly complete project once again, after recently finishing the BOTT XR1 project, and has some renders to show for the final design.
Just a couple ticks off the KTM RC250GP raced in the FIM Moto3 Championship that we saw built in time-lapse last week, the KTM RC250R is perhaps one of the most potent 250cc four-stroke production racers money can buy…and it takes a lot of money to buy one. Only 67 of these machines will be made for the 2013 season (40 for sale, 27 for the Red Bull Rookies Cup), which posed a problem for the KTM. Too big of a production run to be hand-made by racing engineers, and yet too small (and perhaps too important) of a run to be built on one of the four general assembly lines, zie Austrians instead opted for something in between, and built the bikes on the company’s #5 “training” line.
Adopting a liquid-cooled 1170cc boxer engine for its next generation adventure-touring bike, BMW Motorrad is hoping to continue the magic…
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO8wER-7jrs
So here’s the good news, after all the uncertainty regarding its media contracts, the 2013 World Superbike Championship will be broadcasted in the United States afterall. The bad news however is that WSBK racing will be on the beIN Sport network. Yeah, we haven’t heard of them either. A network of sporting channels that is owned jointly by Al Jazeera and Time Warner, beIN Sport is best known for covering soccer (that’s football to our non-American readers) matches from the top series in England, France, Italy, and Spain. There’s some handball coverage in their too.
Just over 18 months ago, I wrote a long analysis of what I believed at the time was the main problem with Ducati’s Desmosedici MotoGP machine. In that analysis, I attributed most of the problems with the Desmosedici to the chosen angle of the V, the angle between the front and rear cylinder banks. By sticking with the 90° V, I argued, Ducati were creating problems with packaging and mass centralization, which made it almost impossible to get the balance of the Desmosedici right.