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Motorcycle Safety Foundation Launches iTunes U Courses

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Want to improve your riding skills from the comfort of your computer or tablet? The Motorcycle Safety Foundation (MSF) has the digital solution for you. Releasing four courses onto the iTunes U store for free, the MSF has made available a wide variety of tips and strategies to help motorcyclists to sharpen and hone their two-wheeled craft.

The four courses are “An Adventure in Motorcycle Physics,” “Dr. Ray’s Street Strategies,” “Dr. Ray’s Guide to Group Riding,” and “Dr. Ray’s Seasoned Rider,” with each class consisting of 20 or so chapters.

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Bikes

Ducati Elite II Café Racer by Moto Puro

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The Ducati 1199 Panigale is perhaps the pinnacle of technology for sport bikes from Bologna, Italy. With 195 horses of fury, and a positively anorexic dry weight of 367 lbs, the spec-sheet racing for the Panigale is intriguing, if getting around a race track the absolutely fastest way possible is your primary goal.

But what if you enjoy the finer things in your Ducati life as well? In that case, the brains at Moto Puro might have just the thing for your Desmo addiction: the Ducati Elite II.

To build the Elite II, the Dutch builders of Moto Puro took a Ducati 1199 Panigale S, and stripped the machine down to its Superquadro engine and electrical components. From there, those crazy Dutchmen built a café racer style motorcycle, complete with tubeless wire-laced wheels on single-sided swingarm.

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MotoGP

MotoGP: Movistar as Yamaha’s Title Sponsor for Five Years

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It is finally official. Yamaha have today announced that they have signed a five-year deal with Spanish telecommunications company Movistar to act as title sponsor for the factory Yamaha team.

The deal will see Movistar branding appear prominently on fairings, leathers, team uniform, team trucks, etc, and the team be called Movistar Yamaha MotoGP.

The deal had been rumored since the start of the year, and had been confirmed unofficially last week, when Movistar presented its TV schedules. But the formal announcement came only today, when the Spanish firm unveiled the price structure for its pay-per-view offering in Madrid.

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News

Ducati Sets Sales Record in 2013 with 44,287 Bikes Sold

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When you tell most people that you ride a motorcycle, their usual question is “so, what do you ride, a Ducati?” The only other brand name so synonymous with motorcycling would be Harley-Davidson.

The famed Italian brand’s distinctive Euro-styling and cultural cachet seemed to resonate with nearly 45,000 people in 2013, as the brand from Bologna sold a record 44,287 motorbikes worldwide last year.

Sales in South Asia rose by 26% with 5,200 motorcycles sold, while the United States, Ducati’s top market, accounted for 24% in sales, followed by Italy at 11.3% and Germany at 10.7%.

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Bikes

Yamaha Trademarks “FJ-09” for the US Market

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In the digital age, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) have become a good resource for sleuthing out upcoming machines from motorcycle manufacturers.

The publicly accessible online databases have outed Ducati’s plans to build a “frameless” motorcycle (later known to be a patent for the Panigale), tipped-off the coming of the water-cooled engines to Harley-Davidson, and even hinted at Honda doing something with the Africa Twin name.

Trademark registrations have tipped off bikes like the Ducati Diavel, Ducati Scrambler, and Yamaha YZF-R3; and for today, it seems another motorcycle has been outed by the government agency: the Yamaha FJ-09. Registered with the USPTO, the FJ-09 is likely to be a three-cylinder sport-tourer, if the tuning fork brand keeps to its naming conventions.

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Bikes

2015 Ducati Diavel Mega Gallery

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Announced today at the Geneva Motor Show, the updated Ducati Diavel is being called a second-generation model, though the power cruiser offers only modest changes for the new model year.

For most riders, the key differences are the addition of the Testastretta 11° DS engine, new exhaust system, and full-LED headlight. These changes come with an additional $1,000 price tag to the “Dark Stealth” base model, and two Diavel Carbon machines (Ducati Red & White Star).

Peak power is the same (162hp) though comes in at 9,250 rpm rather than last year’s 9,500. Like the Dual Spark engine update on the Multistrada, the power range has been broadened, with more power lower in the revs than before. Peak torque is up though, to 96.3 lbs•ft — up from the 94 lbs•ft of last year.

Visually, the big changes are the stock exhaust (tailored to look more like the Ducati Performance Termignoni exhaust), as well as the radiator guards and LED headlight. It’s the headlight element that will catch most people out visually though.

Fans of the Diavel design will enjoy the refresh and modern tech, however if you happen to be in the group that never cared for the looks of Ducati’s Devil, we imagine the change will do little to woo you over. We fall into the latter group, as we’ve never been big fans of the Monster aesthetic, until we saw the Monster 1200 of course.

Without having swung a leg over the machine, we expect the “second-generation” Diavel to be just as much fun to ride as its predecessor. Low, comfortable, and fast…there isn’t much to dislike once you’re behind the handlebars of this machine. Expect to see bikes in or after April; but until then, enjoy the high-resolution photos we have after the jump.

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Bikes

2015 Ducati Diavel Unveiled – DS Engine & LED Headlight

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As expected, Ducati has unveiled an updated version of the Diavel power cruiser today at the Geneva Motor Show, during Volkswagen’s presentation. Expected to hit dealerships from April onwards, the 2015 Ducati Diavel features a Testastretta 11° DS engine, a new exhaust system, and a new full-LED headlight.

With the additional of the “Dual Spark” engine, top power remains the same as before, at 162hp, while mid-range power has been improved upon. Tipping the scales at 452 lbs dry, 11 lbs lighter than before, the updated Diavel is pretty much the same everywhere else though.

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Columns

motoDNA: The Importance of Vision & Connecting the Dots

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Look where you want to go! Steer the bike with your eyes! You go where you look! How often have we motorcyclists heard these phrases?

Looking where you want to go obviously relates to vision, an important sense for everyday life; however when we introduce motorcycles, the importance of vision increases dramatically, not just as an essential tool for high performance riding and racing, but also for survival on the road.

The fact is most of us are damaging our vision, namely our peripheral vision, with our modern lifestyle of sitting in front of TV and computer screens. Compared to our ancestors, our visual field has narrowed dramatically.

If we get into the habit of looking directly at objects while restricting the awareness of our surrounding field of view, it’s comparable to not fully using other areas of our body.

For example if we routinely only bend our knee ten degrees, you could imagine this bad habit of restricted movement would ultimately lead to poor function, soreness, and long-term damage.

It’s safe to assume that our vision also follows the familiar “use it or lose it” rule that is evident in other areas of our body. In other words, if we only use one part of our visual field, the rest of our visual circuitry will begin to go inactive. So how important is peripheral vision to our riding and what can we do to increase our visual performance?

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MotoGP

Ducati Will Compete in MotoGP under the Open Option

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After assessing its position during the two Sepang tests, Ducati Corse has decided to enter the 2014 MotoGP Championship under the “Open Class” rules, which means the factory Ducati team will have more fuel, more engines, and more importantly no engine development freeze for the 2014 season.

In exchange for those advantages, Ducati Corse will be forced to use the Magneti Marelli ECU package supplied by Dorna, rather than the company’s factory-developed electronics.

Explaining its decision, Ducati says that “after carefully considering the two options, [Ducati] has decided that the most suitable one for the current needs of the Bologna-based manufacturer is the Open one, which gives the possibility to the race department to continue the development of the bike and the engine throughout the entire season.”

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Bikes

Yamaha MT-09 Worldcrosser Concept by Oberdan Bezzi

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We already showed you the concept by Oberdan Bezzi for a Yamaha MT-09 based Ténéré adventure-tourer, but we thought we would up the ante now that the Italian designer has inked a “Worldcrosser” version of the three-cylinder machine as well.

Complete with knobbies, and over 150 lbs lighter than the 1,200cc Super Ténéré, the Yamaha MT-09 Ténéré Worldcrosser could also boast a sticker price that is nearly half that of the venerable ADV bike from Yamaha.

It might just be a drawing, but there is something about this concept that really has us excited. To keep the creative juices rolling, there is a café racer version of the Yamaha MT-09 after the jump as well. Could this become the new “go-to” platform for customizers? At $7,990 MSRP, it just might be.

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