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Skully on Friday finally acknowledged what has already been known in the motorcycling community: the company was going out of business. The news comes after a last-minute effort by the remaining management to secure a new round of funding.

With $15 million down the drain, work still to do before the Skully AR-1 would be ready to ship, and a growing group of disgruntled early adopters, Skully’s resurrection was not to be.

Instead in a letter to backers and customers, Skully announced that it would be filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the bankruptcy procedure for companies that are going out of business. This news, of course, directly impacts the thousands of motorcyclists who were expecting to receive a Skully AR-1 helmet.

It was just two weeks ago that we told you about Skully’s investors ousting brothers Marcus Weller and Mitch Weller from the San Francisco startup, and today TechCrunch reports that the motorcycle helmet company will be rather swiftly closing its doors.

A&R readers may remember that Skully’s latest delay to market stemmed from the Skully AR-1 helmet not being ready for mass production, despite the nearly $15 million raised through seed money and a Series A funding round, which was led by Intel Capital.

As such, the closure surely stems from Skully’s investors choosing to shut down the company’s operations, rather than rebuild Skully’s tarnished reputation and retool its product for mass production.

According to TechCrunch, operations at Skully have already ceased, and the website is expected to go offline later today, though as of this writing Skully’s website remains, and its social marketing team is still on Facebook cooling the heels of angry customers.

For reasons we haven’t fully been able to understand, there has been a lot buzz lately about the new Himalayan model from Royal Enfield, the Indian company’s foray into the ADV market.

The premise might seem obvious enough, a small-displacement (410cc) adventure-tourer that is supposed to be cheap, rugged, and easy to work on.

There has always been a trade-off to make in buying a Royal Enfield though, with the “unique” charm of owning a motorcycle from the historic brand having to be balanced against its less than stellar reputation for quality and reliability.

While the idea of a simpler and easier adventure-tourer is certainly appealing to a demographic that is like to have to make repairs on the side of some single-track trail, it just seems you are just as likely to be making those repairs because something on the bike broke for no good reason. There’s a chicken and the egg thing going on somewhere here with this logic.

That being said, if you’re a brand that is try to tackle that very problem, it would probably be best not to show your rough and tumble ADV bike breaking when it is used on a modest of jump. Skip to 1:51 in the video, after the jump, and look for the right footpeg coming off during landing. Hrrm.

After Asphalt & Rubber broke the news about the MV Agusta purchase last week, many of the details about Harley-Davidson’s sale of MV Agusta to the Castiglioni were known or rumored at the time of the purchase’s announcement later in the day; however the exact figures and terms of the agreement were not officially known. Having filed the appropriate forms with the SEC, Harley-Davidson (a publicly traded company) has had to disclose the terms of MV Agusta’s sale, which don’t paint a favorable picture for the Milwaukee brand, but show how Castiglioni “bought” his company back despite bids coming from other parties.

Someone better check the tape measures at Yamaha Motors as the tuning fork brand is having to recall 54,000 YZF-R6 motorcycles built between 2005 & 2010. The recall centers around the mounting of the frontside reflectors (you know, the pieces of plastic that most riders take off before they even leave the dealership), which were not mounted high enough (about 1″ too low) at the factory, and thus fail to meet DOT spec.

Do you remember the video of Kobe Bryant that went viral, and showed the NBA superstar jumping over a speeding Aston Martin? We were pretty amazed by Kobe’s hops (if the video is real), or the great editing that went into the video (if the video is fake). Regardless of that video’s validity, we wish the following gentlemen had either of those talents shown in the above video, because as you’ll see after the jump, when you lack those skills, the stunt goes very wrong.

Ducati owns probably the most valuable brand name in motorcycling, and like many brands Ducati finds ways to monetize this asset by licensing it out to other companies. One great marriage and example of this is the Ducati branded apparel available from Puma, which sees both brands benefitting from a racing/apparel association. One not so great example of this concept however is the Toshiba Satellite U500 Ducati Edition laptop, which sees the vanilla of portable computers get stamped with the mark of Corse Rosa.

It’s not that new Suzuki MotoGP livery is bad, it’s just well…sort of what you’d expect from Suzuki’s factory racing team. When we first heard that Troy Lee Designs was going to give the old Rizla Blue the once over, we were excited to see what the talented company could come up with in the go fast/look good department.

Yet as we look at these pictures, we wonder what happened in the process. Powder blue? Check. Big Rizla Letters? Check. Nothing else that’s remote eye-catching? Check. We sure hope the Suzuki GSV-R performs better than it looks, but we’re not holding our breath. Check out the rest of the photos after the jump.