Erik Buell, we have missed thee. It has been almost a year since we last reported on the demise of Erik Buell Racing, but it has been over two years since we talked about the man himself. What has Buell been up to? Well, from the look of things, making a pivot into the electric motorcycle arena, it seems. Teaming up with New York City boutique bike brand, Vanguard Motorcycles, as well as Formula E car supplier, SPARK Racing Technologies, Buell is part of the new VanguardSpark venture. For its debut, VanguardSpark has two machines on offer. The first is an electric motorcycle (above), called the VanguardSpark Commuter. It’s a simple design, which we don’t find terribly appealing, though one should always reserve some judgments when only looking at a concept machine.
The Volkswagen Group got a new CEO last week, and in less than seven days, that news has already sparked renewed rumors in the German automobile conglomerate divesting itself of Ducati Motor Holdings. For those who have been following Ducati’s saga, there was much talk last year of Volkswagen selling off a number of its other brands, all under the reasoning that the German company would need to raise capital to cover its mounting Dieselgate liabilities. The logic for that reasoning wasn’t sound, but the actions were certainly there, with Volkswagen tendering offers from a number of would-be suitors. There was a fly in the ointment though: Volkswagen’s labor unions, who control half of the VW Group’s board seats, and were vehemently opposed to any brand divestitures.
Zero Motorcycles is reporting a very serious defect with its 2012 model year bikes, specifically affecting the Zero S, Zero DS, and Zero DSP (Police) models. The recall concerns Zero’s battery architecture for the 2012 model year, which may cause cells to fail, and thus create a runaway “thermal event” (read: catches on fire) within the battery pack. In total, this recall affects 218 motorcycle units – the entire volume of Zero S, Zero DS, and Zero DPS motorcycles that were sold for the 2012 model year. In its recall documents, Zero cites three instances (one in Hong Kong, and two in the USA) where the battery packs on the affected 2012 model bikes have failed and lead to a thermal event.
For years, Benelli has lain dormant, at least in the US market. That changes with the Chinese owned, but Italian-run, firm releasing the first of many street bikes for American consumption. It kicks things off with the 2018 Benelli TnT 135 ($2,499). US importer, SSR Motorsports, hosted a quick day ride that began atop Southern California’s Ortega Highway, and concluded in Newport Beach. Renowned for its twists and turns, Ortega Highway is an amusing, but also very high-traveled ribbon of blacktop that links the bustling inland and beach communities. This stretch of roadway is known for accidents as well – would the tiny TnT be able to keep up with “always in a hur
The United Kingdom has a new law, requiring companies with 250 or more employees to report to the authorities the earnings of its workers, by gender. The topic has been a sticking point in the British news cycle right now, with woman across the company showing median earnings that are 12% lower than men, which is a sizable gap in income equality. Where does the British motorcycle industry falls into place in all this? Well as Visordown initially reported, that is more difficult to say, as it appears that only Triumph Motorcycles meets the reporting criteria, amongst motorcycle manufacturers. Technically, it is two brands that meet reporting criteria for gender pay gap, as Triumph Motorcycles Limited and Triumph Designs Limited split their duties for the British marque.
After a poor start, which saw him drop from ninth on the grid to thirteenth at the end of the first lap, Jorge Lorenzo was making steady progress through the field at Qatar. His lap times were starting to come down to match, and on some laps even beat, the pace the leaders were running. As the halfway mark approached, and less than four seconds behind the leaders, Lorenzo started to believe he was capable of salvaging a decent result from a difficult start. That all ended on Lap 13. The Spaniard crashed out of the race at Turn 4, when his front brake failed and he had to drop the bike in the gravel. “I just felt that the level of the front brake was getting closer to my fingers and I didn’t have brake,” Lorenzo described the incident afterwards.
For a long time, the name “Termignoni” was synonymous with “Ducati exhaust”, with the popular scarico-maker being a constant fixture in the Ducati Performance parts catalog. So prevalent was the brand, that if you see a turn-of-the-century (21st century, that is) Ducati clacking down the street with its dry clutch, chances are the exhaust you are also hearing was made by Termignoni. But that has changed in recent years, with Slovenian marque Akrapovič supplanting Termignoni in Ducati’s good graces. To find out why, all one had to do was examine the products themselves – where Termignoni’s pieces were poorly fabricated and over-priced, Akrapovič was infinitely better built and often cheaper.
What you are looking at here is the bike that Honda hopes will win the Suzuka 8-Hours endurance race this year. It is called the Honda CBR1000RRW. It is not all that different from the WorldSBK-spec model, the one that Leon Camier and Jake Gange are competing with currently (and that PJ Jacobsen is helping develop), save for some interesting changes. For starters, the Honda CBR1000RRW dumps its Cosworth boxes, and instead runs the Magneti Marelli electronics package that Jacobsen is using in WorldSBK. Also, there are some obvious bodywork changes, namely where the exposed front spars of the frame would be, which are now covered by a silver painted panel.Then of course, there are the mechanical changes for endurance duty, like quick-change wheel pieces and functional lights.
One of the surprise pleasures at last year’s EICMA show was Honda’s family of “Neo-Sports Café” street bikes, which brought a retro-modern look to Big Red’s approach road bikes. While the new Honda CB1000R tickled our fancy the most, we were delighted to see that the theme extended all the way to the Japanese brand’s small-displacement platform, the Honda CB300R. An attractive and affordable entry-level bike, the Honda CB300R looks like it was designed in Europe, rather than Nippon, which is probably why the 286cc commuter is doing so well in the European market. Seeing that success, American Honda has confirmed the CB300R as an early 2019 model for the US market – available in July 2018.
Another year, and another April Fools Day is done and dusted. I am fairly certain that for journalists, April 1st is better than Christmas, as it marks the one day where media outlets make the news they wish they could report on daily. And as usual, the imaginations of the motorcycle media pool didn’t fail to disappoint. My colleague David Emmett had a nicely done story about the MotoGP World Championship. For my own part, I took advantage of the long-con approach, and fit a story into our ongoing series about the upcoming Suzuki Hayabusa, which seems to have no shortage of weekly rumors about this bike’s supposed features and technical specifications. How about from the rest of the industry though? In case you missed them, the highlights of April Fools Day are after the jump.
Documents filed with the California Air Resources Board (CARB) show that no changes will be coming for the 2018 BMW S1000RR, with the emission levels for the popular superbike shown to be the same as those for the 2017 model.
This means that it is unlikely that we will see a new S1000RR model debut at EICMA later this year, despite seeing spy photos of a restyled S1000RR a month ago.
Hello and welcome to Asphalt & Rubber’s 2017 Superbike Deathmatch – our take on the motorcycle media’s superbike shootout review format, and the solitary path for a motorcycle to become A&R’s Superbike of 2017. Booyah!
What makes the Superbike Deathmatch different from other shootouts, you might ask? Well for starters, instead of renting a track out for a day, and spending only a limited amount of time on the plethora of machines available, we decided instead to take a lesson from college basketball’s very own March Madness.
That’s right, we are using a single-elimination head-to-head bracket system to find out which superbike is the best of the best, and thus worthy of being our Superbike of 2017. Think of it like a two-wheeled Thunderdome: two bikes enter, one bike leaves.
At eight years old, the BMW S1000RR has aged remarkably well, due in part to a healthy update for the 2015 model year.
But, when compared to the cutting edge bikes in the market right now, the venerable “RR” does seem to be lacking some modern touches, so it shouldn’t surprise us to see the German brand updating its machine for the 2018 model year.
Caught testing by the busy lenses at Motorrad Magazine, the 2018 BMW S1000RR appears to be an all-new motorcycle, with several noticeable changes to the chassis, and rumored changes to its four-cylinder engine.
BMW Motorrad is recalling a combined 21 units of its 2017 BMW S1000R and 2016-2017 BMW S1000RR motorcycles because of a rear suspension bolt that may become loose. According to BMW’s NHTSA filings, more specifically the recall affects one S1000R unit and twenty S1000RR units.
The bolt is part of what BMW calls the rear suspension deflection lever, and when it loosens it may adversely affect the handling of the motorcycle.
If you are like us, you can’t get enough of the BMW HP4 Race, which debuted today in Milan, at the 2016 EICMA trade show. Featuring a carbon fiber frame, carbon fiber wheels, and carbon fiber bodywork, not to mention a bevy of premium-spec components, the BMW HP4 Race is the track bike of your wet dreams.
BMW Motorrad plans on making the HP4 Race a production model too, with an expected release date somewhere in the second-half of 2017. Quantities will be limited, and each BMW HP4 Race will be hand-built. So basically, we are telling you that the price tag will be not be cheap.
So for many of us, photos are as close as we are going to get to this supreme beauty. Luckily, we have some ridiculously large photos for you to drool over. Enjoy!
We already had a pretty good idea what to expect from BMW Motorrad at the 2016 EIMCA show, but it is good to see that the Germans can still surprise us – and what a surprise it was, indeed.
Sort of a “one more thing” moment in Milan, the BMW HP4 Race was teased to the assembled EICMA press – giving us a look at their ultra-premium version of the BMW S1000RR Superbike, and it drips in carbon fiber.
Of course what really sets the BMW HP4 Race apart is the fact that it uses a twin-spar carbon fiber frame, making it, and the recently debuted Ducati 1299 Superleggera, the only production motorcycles with such a feature.
Details beyond what we can see are very scarce from BMW Motorrad, though we do know that we can expect the BMW HP4 Race to debut in the second-half of 2017. The name suggests that the bike might not be homologated for street use, but time will have to tell on that.
BMW Motorrad has tallied the sales results for the first half of 2016, and the German manufacturer is on track for another record sales year. BMW says that over 80,000 motorcycles have been sold in the first six months of this year, which is itself a record for the marque.
To be precise, 80,754 BMW motorcycles were sold so far in 2016, a 3% increase over this time last year. Unsurprisingly, Germany remains the strongest market for BMW Motorrad, with 13,792 units sold thus far this year (17% of BMW’s total production).
However, BMW Motorrad saw strong results as well in Spain (+22.6%), Italy (+6.9%) and France (+5.6%). BMW Motorrad also leads the 500cc+ market in Spain, Austria, Belgium, The Netherlands, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa.
To say that Michael Dunlop rode to an impressive win on Friday’s Senior TT, might be an understatement. While winning the Senior TT is his second TT race win for the 2016 Isle of Man TT, Dunlop’s true accomplishment can be found on the time sheets, with his record-breaking pace.
A fortnight of records dropping, this year’s Senior TT was no different, and Dunlop set not only the fastest lap of the Senior TT race, but also the fastest lap of any Senior TT race ever held at the Isle of Man TT: 133.962 mph.
This mark is also the fastest lap ever recorded during an Isle of Man TT race, and is the fastest outright lap ever at the Isle of Man TT. In other words, this is the new mark that all other riders will aspire to surpass in the coming years.
The Senior TT is the blue ribbon event at the Isle of Man TT – it’s the race that every rider wants to win. Don’t let the name fool you, the Senior TT isn’t for riders that are over the hill; in fact, it is the most hard-fought class at the Isle of Man.
Most of the machines on the Senior TT grid are the same as those found in the Superbike TT, but in years passed we have seen specialty bikes built just for the class’s looser set of rules. The last race of the Isle of Man TT fortnight, the Senior TT ends things with a supreme spectacle.
For 2016 though, riders and fans would have to wait a considerable amount of time before the Senior TT would kick off, with the the fog and mist delaying the day’s start considerably. Thankfully the weather gods eventually gave way, and racing commenced. And it was good.
If you have been following our Isle of Man TT coverage, then you already know that Michael Dunlop was the first rider to break the 133 mph lap barrier, the first rider to do a sub-17-minute lap time, and the outright fastest man ever around the Snaefell Mountain Course.
Mickey D would go on to win the Superbike TT race as well, setting a good tone to his Isle of Man TT race week.
Thanks to the miracle of on-board video technology, and the media-friendly forward-thinkers at the TT press office, we can bring you Michael Dunlop’s full record-setting lap.
If you have an extra 16 minutes and 58.254 seconds in your day, we suggest grabbing a beverage, cranking up the volume, and experiencing two-wheeled nirvana. Enjoy!
