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The 2020 WorldSBK Championship calendar has just been released by the FIM, and the 13-round series has some interesting changes for next year.

For American fans, the most obvious and notable change is the lack of a race in the United States, as Laguna Seca has been dropped from the schedule.

Other big changes include moving the Qatar round from the last race of the season, to the second race of the season, which means that it will take place just one week after the MotoGP season-opener at Losail.

It has been a long time coming since we have seen a properly new superbike from Honda, but that day has finally come. The all-new 2020 Honda CBR1000RR-R has been talked about a great deal before this year’s EICMA show, and now it is here.

As we predicted, the new Honda CBR1000RR-R earns that extra “R” with a 215hp (160 kW) four-cylinder engine, that makes 83 lbs•ft of peak torque.

Unlike the outgoing model, this is a truly new machine. The twin-spar aluminum “diamond frame” chassis is a fresh design with increased vertical and torsional rigidity, and the total wet weight of the bike tips the scales at 443 lbs (201 kg) .

We knew going into it that the Ducati Streetfighter V4 would be an expensive motorcycle, and I have been telling readers to brace for a $20,000 price tag since this bike first began teasting.

Well, sometimes it sucks to be right, because the 2020 Ducati Streetfighter will certainly come with an MSRP of $19,995 – which is a lot of money for a naked motorcycle, and places the red bike at the top of the pricing heap in the category.

In 2016, the Yamaha MT-03 debuted as the naked variant of the popular Yamaha YZF-R3 sport bike. And while the R3 came to American soil (with very positive results), its naked sibling never found its way across the pond.

Small and aggressive, the Yamaha MT-03 borrowed the R3’s twin-cylinder engine, and wrapped it in Yamaha’s “Dark Side of Japan” aesthetic. Like its full-fairing sibling, the Yamaha MT-03 was a strong offering for younger riders.

Now for the 2020 model year, the Yamaha MT-03 is finally coming to the United States, complete with a new aggressive look, with the hopes of offering new riders with an intriguing offer that won’t bust the bank.

The Trump administration is about to take on the California Air Resources Board (CARB) in a battle for the rights to set emission standards.

The first blows in this showdown have already begun, with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) sending a letter to the CARB saying that the organization had violated federal law by making an agreement with several automobile manufacturers on higher emission standards

The Trump administration doesn’t seem to end things there though, with the expectation the President will announce plans as early as today to do away with California’s emissions waiver from the Clean Air Act.

While it seems like politics as usual and centered around the auto industry, such a move will have huge implications for motorcycle manufacturers.

After much teasing, and officially debuting the model almost a year ago, we finally know what the 2020 Suzuki Katana will cost American buyers, and the answer is a stout $13,499 MSRP.

We had hoped that the new Katana would be priced aggressively against its naked bike competitors, especially since the “new” machine is largely a restyled Suzuki GSX-S1000F, which comes with an MSRP of $11,299.

That new bodywork must add over $2,000 of value in Suzuki’s eyes though, with the 2020 Suzuki Katana commanding the largest price tag out of the Japanese models in the relevant category.

You probably saw the headline yesterday, the one where the stock market took a nosedive and there was talk of doom and gloom for our economic future.

For those that don't know, the news behind the news is the fact that the bond market saw an inverted yield curve between the 2-year and 10-year treasury bonds. This is a fancy way of saying that investors expect to make more money in the short-term than the long-term, and this opinion reflects where our economy is headed.

For the last 50 years, an inverted yield curve has signaled the start of an economic recession, and while that is a scary thing to think about (we would all rather have a booming economy), the boom/bust cycle is common in economics and can often be mild.

Of course, what is different here is that the last recession that the United States experienced was the worst recession of all time, and in many ways we are still feeling its effects, whether those are physical or merely psychological.

While I will let the financial publications debate what kind of recession we are headed into, if they even agree that a recession is looming in front of us, this news does spark some interesting conversation for the motorcycle industry. Let me explain.

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Episode 109 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and this one is another WorldSBK show. As such, this means that we see Steve English joined by Gordon Ritchie on the mics, as they are now our World Superbike reporting duo for the 2019 season.

Recording straight from the United States, the guys talk about the on-track action at Laguna Seca, where we saw an unbelievable turn of events in the championship standings, mostly in the form of Alvaro Bautista’s complete meltdown on the track.

When the Ducati Multistrada 1200 Enduro debuted, the Italian brand took its popular on-track “Ducati Rider Experience” program, and made an off-road version for their new adventure bike.

Based out of Florence, Italy, the DRE Enduro course aimed to highlight the abilities of the Multistrada 1200 Enduro, as well as providing Ducatisti with a dual-sport experience on the level of the Ducati brand.

Asphalt & Rubber was lucky enough to attend the DRE Enduro back in 2016, and found the DRE Enduro to be one part test ride, one part school, and one part Tuscan vacation.

Now, Ducati is bringing that formula to the United States – the Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah, to be precise.

Call it a win for motorists, as the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that in certain circumstances the marking of tires on parked vehicles with chalk amounts to an unreasonable search and seizure.

As our American readers should all know, the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures is protected by the 4th Amendment of the US Constitution, and here the 6th Circuit ruled in favor of an interesting argument to find that chalk marks on parked vehicles rising to this level of thinking.

The crux of the story centers around the town of Saginaw, Michigan, which has been using tire chalk to measure the time a vehicle is parked in designated parking zones. 

Harley-Davidson is reporting its first-quarter results for 2019, and as you might expect, the Bar & Shield brand continues to sink with its worldwide sales figures. As such, Harley-Davidson saw sales decrease worldwide by 3.8% in Q1 2019, with US sales down 4.2% compared to the same time last year (international sales were down 3.3%).

This news continues a trend for Harley-Davidson, as it continues to see its sales figure moving downward, which is following the overall trend in the US motorcycle industry, where sales are down 4.7% in Q1 2019.

From a relative point of view, this news is perhaps not so bad for Harley-Davidson, as it outperformed the market (though it owns a considerable size of the relevant segments), and in the process of that, the American brand picked up marketshare in its home market

This is of course the business equivalent of escaping being eaten by lion, by merely out-running the person fleeing next to you.