For those Ducati owners who have been pining to visit the world famous Ducati museum in Bologna, but cannot cover the cost or justify the trip, you are in luck. The doors at Via Antonio Cavalieri Ducati have opened to Google Maps to allow you to take the tour without getting up from your computer.
The 9,150 sq ft museum in Borgo Panigale already hosts 40,000 visitors a year and with the virtual tour, Ducati hopes to attract hundreds of thousands more.
I know that I have seen more than a few loyal Asphalt & Rubber readers lament the lack of an online video feed for World Superbike races, and that they hoped that the takeover of the premier production motorcycle racing class by Dorna would add this feature, which is already available with the MotoGP Championship.
Well today, my good friends, that day has come. Dorna has revamped WorldSBK.com, and with those changes comes the WSBK VideoPass feature.
From the limited description given by World Superbike, the WSBK VideoPass sounds pretty much exactly like its MotoGP counterpart, with video streams from the practice, qualifying, and race sessions being made available, along with exclusive behind the scenes footage and interviews.
So you live in the US, have heard about the awesome Superprestigio indoor dirt track race in Barcelona, and you want to watch Marc Marquez, Alvaro Bautista, Maverick Vinales, and Brad Baker go at it, but don’t know how?
Never fear, Cycle World has sprung into the breach and pulled a rabbit out of the hat. The event will be streamed on the Cycle World website, from 9am Pacific. You can find a link to the stream here.
Tip of the hat to Mark Gardiner of Motorcycle USA, for persuading Brad Baker to fly across the Atlantic to take on the challenge.
I am very proud to announce that my good friend and colleague David Emmett (check the reflection in Nicky’s sunglasses) has been named, not once, but twice in the 2013 Silverstone Media Awards for his coverage of the MotoGP Championship and for his website MotoMatters.
For the third year in a row, David has been named the Best MotoGP Blogger, something we already knew here at Asphalt & Rubber, which is why we feature his work, and this year marks David’s first time as the series’ top account on Twitter.
David is too humble to do anything other than announce his hat-trick of trophies, but I have no problems saying that his work is the definitive source for MotoGP commentary.
David’s true journalistic ethic and keen understanding of the internet as a medium of information has quickly distinguished him from his colleagues in the MotoGP paddock, and for all the hard work of his that we read on our computer screens, there is an iceberg of change underneath MotoGP’s murky waters that he has brought about.
Keep up the excellent work my good friend, I think I speak for all the Asphalt & Rubber readers when I say that Silverstone couldn’t have recognized a better man in MotoGP.
If you want to help support David’s site MotoMatters, you can take out a subscription; get one of the stunning MotoMatters.com 2014 Motorcycle Racing Calendars; buy a print from Scott Jones’ website; or simply make a donation.
Have you ever wanted a .motorcycle domain name for your website? Us neither, but if did, your chance is coming soon. Dealer software solutions group Dominon Powersports Solutions has been granted…ahem…dominion over the new .motorcycles domain, one of many new interest-specific domain names made available by ICANN.
Like the .xxx domain name that came before it, the ICANN hopes that it can corral specific interests into these domains, thereby relieve some of the overcrowding that is going on with the current top-level domains (.com, .net, .org, etc). Will it work? Maybe yes, maybe no.
Tomorrow starts the Isle of Man TT — one of the greatest two-wheeled motoring events on this earth. Two weeks of epic motorcycle racing on city streets, if you haven’t been to the TT yet, you really must schedule a trip to meet the Manx. Until you can book those travel plans, we have the next best thing (besides following the TT on A&R, of course): the Isle of Man TT smartphone app.
Motorsport Aftermarket Group (MAG) is probably not a name that many of our readers are familiar with, but it is the company behind brands like Performance Machine wheels, Roland Sands Design, Renthal handlebars, Vance & Hines exhausts, along with a list of other lesser-known aftermarket brands. Straying from its namesake, MAG made some waves recently when it acquired the Motorcycle Superstore online retail outlet.
Another story of interest involves a division of Motorsport Aftermarket Group: the MAG Media Group (MMG), which bought Cycle News back in 2010 and acquired Motorcycle USA with the Motorcycle Superstore purchase. Owning one of the oldest print publications in the business, as well as the largest web-based publication in the industry, MAG has realigned its MMG operations to consolidate the management of the two publications, with longtime editor Paul Carruthers taking on the role of Editorial Director in the business reshuffling.
Not too long ago I gave a presentation at the San Francisco Dainese Store about MotoGP & social media, and one of the interesting points that came up from the discussion was the fact that Casey Stoner did not have a Twitter account. With former-World Champions Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi racking up 400,000 & 600,000 follower respectfully, the current-MotoGP World Champion was voiceless in the online space, which only fueled further the perception that Stoner’s interests in MotoGP resided only with racing on Sunday afternoons.
It may still be the pre-season, but the banter regarding MotoGP on Twitter is certainly getting us ready for the start of the 2012 MotoGP Championship. Sending out a simple infographic this morning with the message, “this picture says it all,” HRC’s official Twitter account posted some interesting statistics that compared Repsol Honda rider Casey Stoner to Ducati Corse’s Valentino Rossi.
Breaking down Stoner’s win percentage over the past five years, the results of course paint an interesting picture. Of course the image “didn’t say it all” as the reaction on Twitter is about what you’d expect from a world widely divided by international boundaries. This of course lead to the image’s immediate removal, but alas nothing truly dies in the digital age.
In case you aren’t already aware, Valentino Rossi is a nine-time World Champion, and also happens to be the favorite son the of MotoGP Championship. Casey Stoner on the other hand…well, the Australian has at best a tumultuous relationship with the public. Naturally, backlash ensued, and HRC finally removed the graphic from its Twitter account.
Asserting that it was all in good fun and simply pointing out some statistics about the last five years, HRC surely was trying to bolster Stoner’s record, and remove the Repsol Honda rider from the “Most Underrated” list in MotoGP — a hard thing to do, even on the heels of a World Championship.
For being a motorcycle mega-brand in his own right, Valentino Rossi has been slow to adapt to this crazy new thing called the internet. A series of tubes, the internet has been a remarkable breakthrough on a variety of levels, changing the paradigm of how we eat, sleep, and waste our lunch breaks at work. Helping teenage girls gossip about their latest crushes, aiding in the massive distribution of pornography to middle-aged men who hide in their basements from their wives and children, and allowing no-talent journalistic hacks to masquerade around as proper motorcycle journalists, there is literally no telling how the internet will change our lives next, and what industries it will turn on their head.
Well get ready for another shockwave ladies and gentlemen, as the G.O.A.T. himself, Valentino Rossi, has hopped on this interweb bandwagon with full 0 & 1 force, first by finally creating his own official website, and now by signing up for a thing called Twitter. Tweeting, twatting, twittering so far in only Italian, Rossi was one of the last hold-outs of MotoGP riders to embrace the micro-blogging service (Randy de Puniet just got on Twitter this week too we might add. Thanks Lauren). Rossi’s move is sure to create a stir with the VR46 crowd, as his legion of fans can now take time out from their busy days of lathering neon yellow paint all of their bodies, and hang onto every one of Rossi’s 140 character messages.
So far, Rossi has tweeted about go-karting, his injured finger, and traveling to Melbourne. We wait with bated breath to see what photo the nine-time World Champion first tweets from his account. Bellissima.
There’s no doubt that Valentino Rossi’s injury at Mugello not only left a hole at Fiat-Yamaha garage, but also created a noticeable void for MotoGP racing as a whole. Perhaps one of the greatest GP racers of all-time, Rossi rarely crashes, and has never been injured so extensively before in his career. And for all the parties involved this incident, it is an untimely disaster that has financial repercussions.
But as the old marketing maxim goes, any press is good press, and with all the coverage that’s surrounded Rossi’s crash, a sizeable amount of “buzz” and media attention has been garnered for the associated parties. What is all that media attention worth? According to internet market research firm eXtrapola, just over 8 million in US dollars (over €6.5 million).