Not everyone can be like Toby Price, and enjoy the benefits of a factory seat inside the Red Bull KTM Factory Racing team, but you can at least get pretty close to having a true Dakar race bike, thanks to KTM offering a replica of its rally raid race bike.
Now with the latest installment of that customer-racer machine, we say hello to the KTM 450 Rally Replica for the 2021 racing season.
Good news if you are a small-displacement racing fan, as the Aprilia RS250 SP will not just be a European affair, as we get word today that the 250cc track bike will be coming to the USA as well.
Interestingly enough, the Aprilia RS250 SP will not make its way across the pond via the Piaggio Group, but instead Rise Moto – the Ohvale distributer for the United States – will be importing the machine.
That shouldn’t be too much of a surprise for those who are in the loop on how the Aprilia RS250 SP came to be (and of course you are, as you religiously read Asphalt & Rubber every day).
At the 2019 EICMA show in Milan, one of the surprises we saw in Italy was the Aprilia RS 250 SP motorcycle. A race-only machine, this quarter-liter four-stroke motorcycle from Noale is designed to be one thing: a cheap racing platform for Italy’s future two-wheeled stars.
Built in partnership with the FMI (Italy’s motorcycling federation) and Ohvale, the Aprilia RS 250 SP promised to be an affordable turnkey race bike, which would compete in a spec-series in Italy next year.
While we knew a bit about the bike’s technical bits, the one key feature missing from the Aprilia RS 250 SP’s debut at EICMA was its price. But now, we know that too: €9,700 – ready to race.
There are many tragedies to the disruptions coming from the worldwide coronavirus outbreak, the loss of motorcycle being one of them (though certainly at a much lesser scale of importance to many of the losses we are suffering right now).
But for the purposes of being a daily motorcycle publication, not being able to see the new Honda CBR1000RR-R Fireblade SP on the WorldSBK stage is certainly a disappointment for us though.
This is because theHonda CBR1000RR-R represents HRC’s great inline-four hope for a production-class world championship title, most notably because the Japanese racing outfit has finally built an all-new racing platform for the superbike market.
Today is a twofer for the Kawasaki Ninja ZX-25R, as we get word from Southeast Asia that the bike’s debut this week has been postponed because of worries about spreading the coronavirus, which means we have to wait just a little longer to find out everything about this 250cc four-cylinder wonder.
On the bright side though, Team Green has posted up this unique carbon fiber creation, which it calls the Kawasaki Ninja ZX-25R Racer Custom model. As the name implies, it is a carbon-fiber-everything version of the ZX-25R, that is track-only.
The 2020 WorldSBK Championship has the promises to be one of the best in recent history, as there are more than a few contenders for the throne lining up on the grid this season.
Of course, there is five-time champion Jonathan Rea, who has been a juggernaut onboard the Kawasaki Ninja ZX-10RR.
Rea will have the target on his back for 2020, that much is for certain, and the Kawasaki Racing Team has shown that they are well-honed operation, and certainly capable of adding metal to Rea’s trophy room.
When you think of race bikes to use for battle on the race track, an old air-cooled BMW boxer twin is probably not the machine your mind immediately lands upon. Though, custom builder Scott Kolb is making a strong case to change that opinion.
This is because his latest creation is a 310 lbs purpose-built racing machine, with 82hp on tap for good measure.
Built around a 1976 BMW R90/6 boxer-twin engine, this blend of something new and something old would certainly be potent – and legal – in most lightweight club racing classes, and that tickles us in all the right places.
I have been lucky in my career to ride some of the finest one-off electric motorcycles ever created. I was the first to ride the Mission R street bike from Mission Motors, and first of two journalists to swing a leg over the Isle of Man winning MotoCzysz E1pc.
I was the first to ride the Alta Redshift SM prototype, back when the company was still called BRD Motorcycles, one of only a handful of souls can lay claim to riding the Lightning LS-218 around a race track, and one of the first to swing a leg over the Energica Ego.
Coming to the Valencia track in Spain, I knew though that I would be adding another one of these special machines to my list, as Energica had invited Asphalt & Rubber to ride its MotoE race bike, the day after the Valencia GP.
Five flying laps on the Energica Ego Corsa is all that we would get this day at the Spanish track, which didn’t include our out-lap and in-lap, which I have to admit disappointed me.
Do not adjust your computer monitors, you are not seeing things incorrectly. This KTM Moto3 bike is having a bit of an identity crisis, as it is now known as the Husqvarna FR 250 GP. Yes, the Swedish brand is making its re-entry in the grand prix racing next year.
Set to be campaigned by Max Racing, which is the team name of former world champion Max Biaggi, Husqvarna’s push back into the Moto3 series is sure to make waves, and that’s before we tell you that the named riders are Romano Fenati and Alonso Lopez.
As you can imagine then, the news made waves when it was announced at the EICMA show in Milan, though perhaps there is some hope that Biaggi’s veteran status can ease the rough edges found on Fenati.
For those that haven’t been keeping track on Asphalt & Rubber, the Brap Talk podcast, and on social media, we are spending more than a little bit of time at the track this year, racing with the Oregon Motorcycle Road Racing Association (OMRRA) to chronicle what it means to become an amateur racer.
I have already outlined my reasons for wanting to go racing, but I wanted to spend the next two article mentioning what I am racing with, both in terms of machinery and gear. First up is an introduction to our racing platform, which for this season is a Kramer HRK Evo2 S.
We have already talked about Kramer’s ready-to-race single-cylinder motorcycles, and in fact our race bike for this series is the same bike featured in that article’s story.
Previously a demo bike for Kramer in the Pacific Northwest, this “S” model machine found its home in my garage, and as you can see from the photo above, it has been on quite the journey since.