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Racing

Photo of the Week: Sunday Night Lights

By Scott Jones 03/07/2011 1 Comment

With the MotoGP season about to begin, all eyes are on Rossi and what he and Jeremy Burgess have been able to accomplish with the Ducati GP11. Will Valentino be thinking of his glory days under the lights on his beloved Yamaha M1? This image, from 2009, shows Valentino in peak form as he began his final championship season with Yamaha. Though Casey Stoner won by almost eight seconds, Rossi began his title chase with a strong second in the first ever Monday night race after a rare desert rain storm ruined the Sunday night schedule.

In this photo Rossi’s bike wears the Forza Abruzzo logo on its tail section, representing Rossi’s contribution to the relief effort to help L’Aquila recover from a devastating earthquake that struck the city on April 6th, 2009. Of all the bikes braking for Turn 1 after Losail’s long front straight, Rossi’s showed the brightest brake discs, glowing hot like fire in the desert.

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Bikes

Bottpower BOTT XR-1 – If Buell Made a Harley

By Jensen Beeler 03/07/2011 10 Comments

Bottpower may have not had the most success in the Moto2 racing category, but they sure know how to make some drool-worthy motorcycles. Taking its hands to a different style of motorcycle, the Spanish firm envisions a flat track racer that’s not too disimilar from the Harley-Davidson XR1200. Cool, but not crazy, right?

Well the best part about this one-off motorcycle, which Bottpower is making the frame for a special customer (a kit for other customers may be possible if the demand is there), is that the BOTT XR-1 will be built from spare Buell parts, which is a sorta of perverse and ironic twist of fate if you ask us.

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Bikes

Ducati’s First Valentino Rossi Branded Motorcycle

By Jensen Beeler 03/03/2011 17 Comments

Helping send off Valentino Rossi and Nicky Hayden on their 2011 MotoGP Championship season, Ducati is holding a big event in downtown Bologna on Friday night. Naturally of course the two MotoGP riders will need something to make an entrance with, and Ducati thought this would be the perfect time to tap its Monster Art program for some Rossi/Hayden GP replica paint schemes that take their cues from the duo’s Ducati Desmosedici GP11 race bikes.

The first of what is surely to be many Ducati motorcycles to have the yellow “46” on them, we’re still having some trouble getting used to the neon yellow/Rosso Corsa combo, but we’re this will be the best selling livery in Ducati Monster Art personalization package. Wake us up when the Ducati Superbike 1198 Rossi Rep comes out.

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Banter

Palatinus Attila Reminds Us That We Can Ride in the Winter

By Jensen Beeler 03/03/2011 5 Comments

While for most Americans it’s still too inclement to ride our motorcycles, Palatinus Attila sees the frozen terrain as an opportunity. As our bikes remain shut away in their garages until spring time, this intrepid lad has taken out his power drill, several hundred screws, a bit of patience, and transformed his CBR600F4 from street machine to ice queen. The result is not a rolling porcupin, but instead a machine that can find a contact patch even on the slickest of ice sheets. Take those modified tires, your bike, and find a frozen lake, and you too can do wheelies for days, just like in Attila’s latest video Ice Riding 2.0. Check it out after the jump.

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Racing

Honda Now Has Five Factory Riders – Knights San Carlo Honda Gresini as a Factory Squad

By Jensen Beeler 03/02/2011 9 Comments

How serious is Honda about winning the 2011 MotoGP World Championship? At Team Gresini’s MotoGP launch at Monza today, it was quietly confirmed that the San Carlo Honda Gresini squad has been given the keys to the candy store, turning the team into a factory-backed effort. While Marco Simoncelli was already assured factory support from Honda for the 2011 season, the move adds Hiroshi Aoyama to the factory rider list, and likely makes Gresini’s life infinitely less complex by not having to manage between a factory and non-factory split garage.

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Bikes

Product Lust: Photoshopped MV Agusta F3

By Jensen Beeler 03/01/2011 21 Comments

Our friend Anthony at desmoworks will probably be the first person in California to own the new MV Agusta F3 supersport motorcycle, which is expected to debut later this Fall as a 2012 model, but that hasn’t stopped him from photoshopping up some ideas on what to do with his F3 when it arrives. Mirrors? Headlights? Turn signals? Those are all well and good if you plan on riding on the street, but Anthony plans on putting his F3 to work.

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Opinion/Editorial

Are Electronics the New Horsepower?

By Jensen Beeler 03/01/2011 16 Comments

The news of the 2011 Aprilia RSV4 R APRC got me thinking today about where the sport bike market is headed from a big picture perspective.

The sport bike market has been dominated the constant need to develop motorcycles with more power, less weight, and new performance enhancing technologies, and you’d be hard pressed to find a year where the bike with the most horsepower wasn’t the top-seller in this category (case in point: the complete sales domination of the BMW S1000RR during 2010).

For years the motorcycle manufacturers, especially the Japanese, have been painting themselves into a corner by constantly having to one-up each other with horsepower figures in order to sell motorcycles in this segment.

With bikes like the 2011 Kawasaki Ninja ZX-10R approaching the 200hp barrier, the question about “how much power is enough?” has been cropping up, and it certainly could be that we’re approaching the point in time where the relevancy of this metric is losing it’s power (pun moderately intended).

So what will be the new kingmaker for sport bikes? The electronics package.

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Racing

Honda Denies Using DCT in MotoGP – Admits to Having New Faster Shifting Transmission

By Jensen Beeler 02/28/2011 8 Comments

The Honda RC212Vs are fast this year, there’s no denying the point. The top four overall testing times at the second Sepang test were each slotted to one of the four factory Honda riders. The Japanese company is hungry for another World Championship in the premier class, something it hasn’t seen since Nicky Hayden took the honor in 2006, and its fielding of three very capable riders in the Repsol Honda squad is just one of the measures Honda is willing to go to in order to better its chances for victory.

While all of the 2011 MotoGP race bikes are basically improvements upon the 2010 designs, Honda has spent the long winter months developing technology that will trickle down through the coming seasons, as MotoGP heads back to a 1,000cc format.

Accused of developing and using a dual-clutch transmission (DCT) by the Italian press, Honda has come under scrutiny for using a technology that is banned in GP racing. While it’s true that Honda was the first to develop a DCT for a production motorcycle (the VFR1200F), the Japanese company has come clean in order to dispel any rumors that it is cheating in the pinnacle of motorcycle racing. While not using a DCT, Honda says it has developed a new transmission that is in compliance with MotoGP regulations, and produces extremely quick gear changes, like a dual-clutch transmission.

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Racing

Photo of the Week: Ducati Meccanica

By Scott Jones 02/28/2011 4 Comments

As the Ducati Cup, also know as World Superbike, enters the 2011 season, the grid looks odd without a presence many have taken for granted for several decades, a factory Ducati team. While Ducati does have Valentino Rossi on its prototype GP11 this year, the Xerox WSBK team is no more, leaving others to defend Ducati’s honor in the series. This weekend at Philip Island, Carlos Checa rode his Althea Ducati to pole and a double victory, dominating the weekend. Though the Bologna factory may not be present as an official team entry, Ducati’s racing heritage appears well represented in World Superbike for 2011.

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Bikes

Aprilia Caponord 1200 Adventure Bike Spied

By Jensen Beeler 02/28/2011 5 Comments

According to the folks at Motociclismo.it, this is the first shot of Aprilia’s new adventure-touring motorcycle, the Aprilia Caponord. Based on the 1200cc Dorsoduro chassis and motor, the Caponord (or Tuareg 1200 if you want to believe other rumors) was originally supposed to debut at the 2010 EICMA show, but is now apparently slotted for a later arrival. Details are scarce on the model right now, but it’s clear from the 17″ front wheel and street-derived chassis that Aprilia is gunning for the Ducati Multistrada 1200 with its design.

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Banter

5 Interesting Facts from Harley-Davidson’s Annual Report

By Jensen Beeler 02/25/2011 17 Comments

While we’re still poring over Harley-Davidson‘s annual report, making Excel spreadsheets, and winning at bullshit bingo, a couple interesting facts have struck us about the company and some of the trends it is experiencing. While it’s been mostly doom and gloom around Harley-Davidson in 2010, the Milwaukee-based company does appear to be solely in business because of the strong cost-cutting CEO Keith Wandell has been able to achieve during his tenure. Despite the moaning and groaning from the Bar & Shield loyal about Wandell’s non-motorcycle riding lifestyle, the CEO knows how to trim the fat, which is exactly what this HOG needed. Find five interesting facts for you to mull over this weekend after the jump.

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