It is that time of year again, where the Christmas season takes over the motorcycle industry, and gives us all a good excuse to get drunk with our moto-loving co-workers. Huzzah!

First up to help us with the holiday cheer are the good folks at KTM USA, who certainly don’t get paid enough to be mining this sort of internet gold, but yet did it all the same for our holiday enjoyment.

Bikes

As we look back in hindsight, the Ducati 1199 Superleggera has to be one of the more compelling bikes to come out of 2013. A motorcycle built with the unilateral approach of making the lightest sport bike possible, the Superleggera doesn’t disappoint from a technical point of view. However, judging from some of the reactions of its debut, some readers would have liked to see Ducati stray away from the Corse inspired livery, which had already been featured on the Ducati Desmosedici RR — Ducati’s previous halo bike. We understand that sentiment, after all not everyone is into the more-orange-than-red “Flouro Rosso” paint job that Ducati’s racing machines now wear in the premier class. That is where the Ducati 1199 Superleggera Tricolore Nero by Tessoart comes into play.

Reviews

Is there truth in motorcycle reviews? That seems to be a debate that crops up time and time again. So it is refreshing when we see a frank motorcycle review that is free from the entanglements of typical motorcycle assessments — you know, a real honest impression of how a motorcycle is built in the factory and rides on the open road. With a review as honest as this about the Triumph Bonneville, our protagonist has almost assured himself of a short career in motorcycle journalism. Still, it certainly provides some worthwhile entertainment, as long as you are not easily offended. It is possibly not safe for work as well — not that you read A&R from the confines of your office chair of course.

Bikes

When KTM’s product road map leaked onto the internet, it showed that three small-displacement motorcycles would be built by the Austrian brand (with some help from its Indian shareholder and partner Bajaj). The first of these machines was the KTM 390 Duke and its progeny, and the second of these machines was just released: the KTM RC390 (along with the RC125 & RC200). A third model was teased on that now infamous powerpoint slide, a bike that was simply labeled as an “Enduro 350” model, though sources since then have described the bike to be more like a supermoto or small adventure bike. It seems today we have our first glimpse of the machine, as a supermoto based off the Duke platform has been spotted in Austria by a forum member at KTMForum.eu.

News

The tease of 2013 has to be Kawasaki and its supercharged four-cylinder engine, which the Japanese OEM debuted at this year’s Tokyo Motor Show. Showing the engine, and giving virtually no information about the intended uses of the supercharged power plant, we have been left to speculate over what Kawasaki’s intentions are in the two-wheeled forced-induction realm. Diving through the Google’s database of patent applications though, we see that over the years Kawasaki has published a number of patents that relate to adding a supercharger to a motorcycle. Not only has Kawasaki been thinking about how to fit a supercharger into a motorcycle for some time now, but the OEM has some clever tricks up its sleeve in order to optimize its designs.