Aprilia USA will be part of MotoAmerica’s inaugural season, as the US subsidiary of the Italian brand confirmed an officially supported entry into the MotoAmerica Superstock 1000 class.
To go racing, Aprilia has partnered with HSBK Racing to form the “Aprilia HSBK Racing” team, which will campaign a two-rider lineup on the 2015 Aprilia RSV4 Factory superbike. The names of the riders have not been released as of yet.
The Ducati 1299 Panigale launch is just wrapping up in Portimao, and while Asphalt & Rubber isn’t there to tell you all about Ducati’s new flagship model, we’ve got a bevy of high-resolution photos of the new superbike for you.
With 205hp from its bored out v-twin Superquadro engine, the 1299 is said to be beast. Thankfully Ducati has put some of the most advanced electronics on the new Panigale, including one of the first inertial measurement units (IMU) on a motorcycle — an acronym we suspect we will be talking a lot about in the next few years.
Unfortunately, our analysis today is limited to the refined looks of the Ducati 1299 Panigale, which has minor aesthetic changes from the 1199…most notably, the wider front cross-section, for better wind protection and aerodynamics.
We’ll have more to say when we’re finally allowed to swing a leg over one, until then enjoy all 167 wallpaper-ready photos after the jump.
Just a year after being acquired by KTM CEO Stefan Pierer, Husqvarna Motorcycles posted an all-time sales record of 16,337 units. The tally is the most the Swedish brand has ever sold in its 111 year history, which is perhaps surprising considering the company’s tenuous history as of late.
With those record sales, Husqvarna also posted over €100 million in revenue, a key metric for the brand, as it struggles to grow into KTM’s more exclusive and upscale counterpart.
The Vyrus 986 M2 Moto2 race bike is perhaps one of the most beautiful machines to grace the pages of Asphalt & Rubber, as it comes with ample portions of avant-garde design and outside-of-the-box chassis design inklings.
We also like the Vyrus 986 M2 because its true to the ethos of the Moto2 class, where chassis designers were free to build around a spec-motor and racing package.
But, instead of getting a buffet of wild designs, we saw a race to the middle. The differences between the chassis provided by companies like Suter, Kalex, FTR are so minute that the smallest of changes can shake up the standings on race day.
It’s something we have talked about before, here at A&R, but the short explanation is that race teams are conservative entities, and developing a radically new chassis is a massive undertaking full of risks.
Well, it look like Vyrus is up to the the task and that danger, as the company is going racing with its Vyrus 986 M2 design in the Spanish CEV Moto2 Championship.
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.
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.
At the Verona Motor Bike Expo, Ducati presented the first customized Ducati Scrambler models. As you may remember from our review, this $8,600 machine is pitched with a heavy lifestyle component, and Ducati hopes that fat margins on t-shirts and jackets will overcome the thin margins on the model itself. To that end, the Italian company has gone to great trouble in making the Scrambler “cool” for the younger “post-authentic” crowd.
As such, Dario Mastroianni (Officine Mermaid), Filippo Bassoli (Deus Ex Machina), and Nicola Martini (Mr. Martini) were given the first crack at modding Ducati’s newest model. The results have been interesting, and first up on our pages is the “Hondo Grattan” by Filippo Bassoli and the Deus Ex Machina crew in Milan.
As owners take receipt of their purchases, 2015 will be marked significantly by the arrival of the Kawasaki Ninja H2/R supercharged sport bikes.
Kawasaki has assured us that it won’t take much tinkering for the H2 street bike to meet the performance specs of the H2R, a fact many deriders of the machine seem to forget when spec-sheet racing.
We are perhaps disappointed that Kawasaki made owning a Ninja H2 and Ninja H2R such an exclusive process, as it robs us of the chance to see some extreme concepts and customizations from the motorcycling community.
Take this streetfighter concept of Kawasaki Ninja H2R by AD Koncept, for instance. Pure brawny muscle, the H2 surely has the makings of being the ultimate streetfighter.
2014 is another banner year for KTM, as the Austrian brand set another all-time sales record, selling 158,760 to customers last year. That figure solidifies KTM’s position as the largest European brand, beating out BMW yet again, though Team Orange got a lot of help from its Indian operations with minority partner Bajaj.
This sales figure includes sales from Husqvarna, so a little cheating is going on, but Husky’s contribution to KTM’s 28.2% sales growth is marginal at best. With that boost in sales, KTM is also reporting a 20.7% increase in revenue (€864.6 million), taking home €75 million (EBIT).
In a comprehensive report of various automobile safety systems, the American Automobile Association (AAA) released intriguing findings about blindspot monitoring systems, with some thoughts as how they pertain to motorcycles.
While the driver aid systems are exactly that, systems designed to aid a driver in operating a passenger vehicle safely, AAA found that not only were drivers relying on them to heavily, in lieu of safe driving practices, but also that in certain situations the systems operated sub-optimally.
The study’s findings that pertain the most to motorcyclists are those on blindspot monitor systems, which AAA found have a hard time detecting fast-moving vehicles, and often served warnings too late for an evasive action to take place by the automobile driver.
We already know that BMW Motorrad broke last year’s sales record…in November, so it is no surprise then that we report that 2014 was another sales record for the Bavarian brand.
Selling 123,495 units last year in total, this means that BMW Motorrad is up another 7.2% in sales — strong and steady growth for the German company, with December selling 7,032 units (+10.9%).
“We can look back on a successful year. For the first time in company history, BMW Motorrad sold more than 120,000 vehicles,” said Stephan Schaller, President of BMW Motorrad
“This is an increase of 7.2% compared to the already outstanding result of the previous year and is the fourth year of record sales in a row. I would like to express my sincere thanks to all our customers for the trust they have placed in BMW Motorrad.”