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2015 Honda RC213V Livery Mega Gallery

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HRC unveiled its factory MotoGP team this weekend in Bali, Indonesia — giving us our first glimpse of the Repsol Honda livery for the 2015 season.

Both Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa were in attendance, which is no surprise considering how important the Indonesian market is for Honda.

The Indonesian unveil also helps the two GP riders to have only a short hop now to Malaysia, to start the MotoGP season with the first official test a Sepang International Circuit.

As for the 2015-spec RC213V, things remain mostly the same to the layman’s eye. Red Bull’s sponsoring and support of both Pedrosa and Marquez, as well as the Repsol Honda team, is more prominent, and displayed on the belly pan fairing of the bike.

We’ll let you play spot the differences in the photos after the jump, they are super-sized high-resolution shots, so they might take a minute to load. Enjoy!

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MotoGP

The Season Begins – Private MotoGP Tests Start at Sepang

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Officially, testing for 2015 MotoGP season starts in five days time, on Wednesday, 4th February. Unofficially, it started yesterday, when Yamaha and Honda’s test teams gathered at Sepang to pre-test a number of parts and prepare the way for the arrival of the factory riders, who arrive in Malaysia next week.

Normally, test teams test in secret – a local journalist and photographer was told in no uncertain terms he would not be welcome at the track – which means their work goes unnoticed. Unfortunately for Honda – or perhaps fortunately, depending on your perspective – HRC had a very high-profile test rider at Sepang.

Casey Stoner spent a couple of days on the 2015 Honda RC213V, and he made a couple of posts on his Instagram and Twitter accounts gave a few clues about the test.

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MotoGP

Analyzing Yamaha’s 2015 MotoGP Launch

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2014 did not go to plan for Yamaha. After the first four races of last year, Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo trailed the Repsol Hondas by 76 points in the team championship, and Yamaha was 33 points behind Honda in the manufacturers standings. Marc Márquez was in the middle of an unbeaten run, Dani Pedrosa backing him up strongly.

There were a lot of good reasons for Yamaha’s troubled start. Yamaha was struggling to get a smooth throttle response from a liter less fuel, the new Bridgestone tires were less suited to the YZR-M1’s need for high corner speeds, and Jorge Lorenzo arrived at the start of the season out of shape, after neglecting his training after surgery during the winter.

2015 looks like being the polar opposite. At the launch of their 2015 campaign, the Movistar Yamaha team looked forward with some optimism. Building on the progress made in the second half of 2014, the bike is much more competitive, Valentino Rossi arrives motivated by his strong season, and Jorge Lorenzo is lean and fit, having spent all off-season preparing. They are ready for big things.

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Bikes

2015 Yamaha YZR-M1 & Team Livery Mega Gallery

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Yamaha is ready to go racing in the 2015 MotoGP World Championship, and the Japanese OEM debuted today its factory team and racing livery. Of course riding for Yamaha Racing are Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi, and their weapon of choice will be the Yamaha YZR-M1 GP race bike.

2015 does not see too much changing in the MotoGP rulebook, so the 2015 Yamaha YZR-M1 is fairly close in spec to the 2014 model, though you can be certain that Yamaha and its team of engineers have not been wasting the off-season time with idle hands.

This season sees Abarth, the tuning brand of Fiat, as an official sponsor of the Yamaha MotoGP team, re-igniting the two company’s previous collaboration when both Rossi and Edwards worked for the Iwata-based manufacturer.

We won’t bore you with anymore details, we know you came for the high-resolution photos. You’ll find plenty of them, in all their bandwidth-busting glory, after the jump.

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MotoGP

Kawasaki To Return To MotoGP? An Unlikely Tale…

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Rather perversely, a lot of the talk at the World Superbike test at Jerez has not been about World Superbikes at all. Which is a shame, as the 2015 World Superbike championship promises to be particularly fascinating, with testing times very close indeed.

Instead, there was a real kerfuffle about the slowest bike on the track, the one being ridden by Kenny Noyes and Dominique Aegerter.

The cause of the fuss? The fact that it was a Kawasaki, a further development of the Open class bike raced by the Avintia Racing team in MotoGP last year, has generated a mountain of speculation that Team Green is preparing a comeback to MotoGP, bringing all four major Japanese factories back into the premier class.

The truth was a good deal more prosaic.

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MotoGP

MotoGP: Yonny Hernandez Injures Shoulder in Training

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Yonny Hernandez is to miss the first Sepang test. The Colombian rider crashed while riding dirt track, falling heavily on his left shoulder, and dislocating the shoulder. As a result, Hernandez will not be able to ride at Sepang, and will be replaced by Ducati’s test rider, Michele Pirro.

The good news for the Pramac Ducati rider is that the damage was mainly microfractures, and the ligaments and tendons were undamaged. The shoulder is a very complex joint, held together by a complicated network of tendons, cartilege and ligaments which allow it to move freely, but is vulnerable to damage.

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Bikes

Report: Honda RC213V-S Priced at ¥20 Million

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According to a report made by The Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s second largest daily newspaper, Honda has green-lit the RC213V-S project, with a price tag of 20 million yen — roughly $170,000 USD.

The Honda RC213V-S debuted at the 2014 EICMA show, and was as advertised: a MotoGP race bike with lights and mirrors added to it.

Honda teased show-goers and the media by say that the RC213V-S model was only a prototype, adding more fuel to the speculation regarding whether the Japanese firm would actually produce the long-awaited model.

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MotoGP

Casey Stoner Will Continue To Test Ride for HRC in 2015

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Casey Stoner is to remain as a Honda test rider for another year. Today, HRC officially announced that the former world champion will undertake two tests for the factory during 2015.

The first test will be at Sepang from 29th to 31st of January, four days before the official MotoGP test at the circuit.

No date has been set for the second test, HRC stating only that it will be towards the end of the year, when Stoner will presumably be providing feedback on the 2016 machine.

No doubt this agreement will once again revive speculation that Stoner could return to MotoGP, but there is zero chance of that actually happening.

The Australian has stated both in public and to HRC boss Shuhei Nakamoto that he does not want to race again, and has turned down an offer from HRC before.

His speed and the quality of the feedback he provides means he remains an extremely valuable asset to Honda’s test program.

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MotoGP

MotoGP: Ducati’s Desmosedici GP15 Officially Delayed

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As had been widely expected, Ducati will not have the GP15 ready for the first test at Sepang, in early February.

In an interview with the MotoGP.com website, due to be shown on 19th January, Ducati Corse boss confirmed that work was still underway on the all-new bike; and that instead, Ducati will be bringing an uprated version of last year’s bike, dubbed the GP14.3, to test aspects of the new design not requiring the new engine.

The delays have been trailed by both Dall’Igna and Paolo Ciabatti, speaking to the media at the Valencia test and at the Superprestigio dirt track event in December. The GP15 is a completely new bike, designed from the ground up, with a completely redesigned engine.

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Columns

Trackside Tuesday : A 2014 Photo Retrospective – Part 1

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As the countdown to the new season gathers momentum I thought I’d have a look back at some of my favourite photographs from 2014.

The image above of Scott Redding was taken as he came in for a tire change during qualifying at Le Mans. Sometimes the riders will disappear to the back of the garage during qualifying.

If you’re lucky they will stay on the bike while the crew get to work. If they do, it provides a great opportunity for a portrait as was the case here.

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Rating the Riders of MotoGP 2014: Aleix Espargaro – 7th

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In the fifth part of our season review of 2014, we turn to the Espargaro brothers. Both Pol and Aleix had excellent seasons, impressing many with their speed. If you would like to read the four previous parts of our season review, they are here: Marc Marquez, Valentino Rossi, Jorge Lorenzo, Dani Pedrosa, Andrea Dovizioso, and Pol Espargaro.

7th – 126 points – Aleix Espargaro

After being the best CRT rider two years running, all Aleix Espargaro wanted was to get a chance to test himself against the best riders on the world on equal machinery.

In 2014, he came very close to doing just that. Riding the Forward Yamaha – basically a 2012 Yamaha YZR-M1 with bodywork, triple clamps, linkage, and other peripheral parts built by FTR – in the Open class put the elder Espargaro brother on a bike which was fast enough to scare factory Yamaha rider Jorge Lorenzo into demanding that Yamaha seriously consider switching to the Open class.

As the season progressed, it would become apparent that there were still serious performance differences between the Forward Yamaha and the factory bikes. Yet Aleix Espargaro still ended the year having impressed a lot of people, and earning himself a factory ride for 2015.

It wasn’t all plain sailing, though. Espargaro generated a lot of excitement during preseason testing, consistently elbowing his way into the top five, and topping the Qatar test when the factory riders were absent.

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