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We are still getting over the loss of Tommy Aquino, who died while riding motocross in Southern California just last week. A popular rider in the AMA Pro Racing, British Superbike, and Spanish CEV series, the untimely passing of Tommy is being felt around the world.

A memorial service for Tommy will be held at 2PM on Saturday, February 15th at the Bishop Alemany High School (11111 North Alemany Drive, Mission Hills, CA). A remembrance is also scheduled afterwards at 28588 Santa Catarina Road, Saugus, CA — the Aquino Family encourages all to attend.

While we all continue to grieve, we do best to remember the good times, and as such Roversberg Productions has put together a nice tribute video of Tommy. Enjoy it above.

So what happened to the lap times? When MotoGP tested here at Aragon back in June, Jorge Lorenzo was nearly one and a half seconds faster than his time on the first day of practice. Marc Marquez was half a second slower than his time in testing, despite being the fastest man after FP1 and FP2, Valentino Rossi was a second slower, and Dani Pedrosa was just a couple of tenths slower than his test time, set here three months ago.

The answer is simple: no grip. Grip is missing both front and rear, as temperatures have soared unusually high at the Spanish circuit. The track is also dirtier: a car event held before the test had laid rubber down and swept the track clean, but that was not the case ahead of this weekend. The lack of grip has meant everyone has struggled to match the lap times from earlier in the year.

UPDATE: This bike is no longer available, though though the FTR Moto2 bike that Alex de Angelis used to win the Sepang round this year has just found its way back to the FTR shop.

Trolling the internet for things I can’t afford, but which my credit card can, I think I may have discovered the perfect gift for the motorcyclist who has everything: a 2011 FTR M211 Moto2 race bike that has been upgraded with 2012-spec components.

Featuring a Spanish CEV Moto2-spec Honda motor with 186 miles on it, this FTR M211 has plenty of tasty other bits that also justify its €39,000 (+VAT) price tag, such as the Öhlins suspension (FG366 forks, TTX36 shock), magnesium OZ wheels, AP brakes, Akrapovic exhaust, carbon fiber bodywork (Yonny Hernández’s Blusens livery), and titanium fastners.

The Vyrus 986 M2 has to be one of the most gorgeous motorcycles we’ve ever seen grace our pages here at Asphalt & Rubber. It’s edgy and doesn’t conform to many of the elements we’d expect from a motorcycle design, and best of all Vyrus intends to race the hub-center steering bike (well maybe the fact you can buy one/build your own is the best thing of all).

With the Moto2 World Championship perhaps out of reach for the small Italian company, we instead see the Vyrus 986 M2 making an entry in the Spanish CEV Moto2 Championship, a national-level series that uses the same rules as the World Championship. Helping Vyrus enter that series is exhaust manufacturer MIVV, which has some experience in the CEV series, having partnered with FTR in past years.

Angel-Rodríguez-CEV-Spanish-Supersport

First it was baseball, then the witch-hunt progressed through the other professional sports, going as far as NASCAR and Formula1. So, it makes logic sense to say that it was only a matter of time before the issues of athletic doping entered into the motorcycle racing world.

While the issue of doping in motorsports seems almost absurd, considering the benefits of athletic doping are deminimus when machinery takes center-stage, it would seem our beloved sport is not immune from athletes looking for that extra edge during competition.

UPDATE: David Emmett of has revealed in the comments below that Rodríguez, while testing positive during a doping screening, in fact had recreation drugs in his system, not performance enhancing drugs as we had thought earlier. Thanks for the tip David.