Consider the curious case of one Erik Buell. By all counts a mad genius who was able to make even the archaic push-rod Harley lump semi-attractive to sporting riders, he is also the embodiment of a tragic hero from an Euripides epic, fatally flawed and ultimately falling short of immortality. The shades of gray that…
The Honda CB-1 is everything you have come to expect from Honda: exquisitely engineered, sublime build quality, wonderful ergos, reliability and performance. It also has a few things you might not have come to expect: it is missing bodywork (eek, it’s naked!), it is missing weight, and it is missing displacement. All of this equates…
When you think “high speed touring” the usual suspects usually begin with BMW and then taper off quickly towards some muted, former sportbike, Japanese road missile (think Connie or otherwise). All good choices, to be sure. But if I challenged you to narrow your answer to cover the 1970s and 1980s, what would you say?…
Honda has always been like, well, Honda. Never content unless there was a more complicated engineering solution to an already solved problem, Honda obliterated norms and reached for new frontiers throughout the 1980s. This was clearly evident in today’s bike, a beautiful VR1000R. You see, Honda already had the successful VF lineup in place, including…
The fanboys will tell you that the MV Agusta F4 created a warp in the sportbike space-time continuum. With serious power developed with the help of Ferrari racing engineers and overall design courtesy of the Cagiva Research Center and legendary artist Massimo Tamburini, the limited Senna edition created a rare and gorgeous motorcycle with performance…
The 1980s were a period of gestation for Ducati, hitting their sportbike stride with the move from the bevel drive motors to the now-ubiquitous rubber belt-driven desmo valve train. And while Japan focused on technology such as four valves per cylinder, liquid cooling and a constantly changing array of multi-cylinder configurations, Ducati stuck to what…
Update 10.18.2018: This bike has SOLD! Congratulations to buyer and seller! -dc If you gaze upon modern motorcycles today and think that they are all starting to look alike, you’re not alone. There is a certain #metoo movement in current motorcycle design. But cast your eye back a few short – like 40 – years…
Update 5.11.2018: Based on his latest eBay listing, the 1989 is still available. Our original write up from November is shown below. Good luck to buyers and seller! -dc When RSBFS last listed this 1989 Kawasaki KR-1R on our pages, we considered it to be a bit of a world exclusive. That should tell you…