Yamaha’s YZF1000 wasn’t a big seller, and was available in the US for only one year, making this an extremely rare bike here. Five valves, five gears, and 1003cc’s should tell you pretty much all you need to know about this bike. Known as the “Thunderace” in many markets, the big YZF was a strange…
Look, I’d really buy this Ducati Sport 1000SE just for the insanely cool 2-into-2 high/low Zard exhaust and get a pretty nice bike thrown in for free. Because if I had the money and space to collect a bunch of bikes, the Sport 1000 would be on the list, and I’d want one with this…
Bimota made their name building lean, spare, race-oriented bikes with only the barest nods to streetability. So the DB3 Mantra was a bit of a left-turn for them, as it was purely meant to be a road bike and had no track pretensions. Unfortunately, released from the requirement to make the bike aerodynamic for speed…
At some point, I think I’m doomed to buy a K4 GSX-R1000: when I go to track days, it seems like all the older riders are using them, and it won’t be all that long before I’m one of those grizzled old track rats. But do they get them as retirement gifts from Social Security?…
Yamaha’s RZ500 was known in some markets as the RD500LC, but by any name, it was one of the weirdest and wildest sports machines ever built. The twin-crank, liquid-cooled two-stroke V4 featured a set of torque-boosting YPVS powervalves and standard Autolube oil-injection so riders could worry less about premix and more about handling what was…
Other manufacturers had to scramble a bit when Suzuki pulled the rug out from under them with their thoroughly modern GSX-R750. But they recovered quickly, and the Seven-Fifty Wars of the late 1980’s and 1990’s produced some terrific motorcycles like this Kawasaki ZX-7 that have been neglected for a long time. They weren’t particularly rare…
The iconic GSX-R750 looked ready for endurance racing right off the showroom floor. But while it set the standard in terms of racy looks, there were plenty of compromises made for production, and the 1986 GSX-R750R Limited Edition helped rectify that. The homologation LE included the regular production ’86 bike’s change to a longer swingarm,…
It was clear that Ducati had a lock on the “sexy v-twin” market in the mid-90s, selling basically every 916 they could make at a very premium price. But, aside from the funky, springless valves, they weren’t really offering anything all that innovative, and Suzuki figured they could do something much better for cheaper. And…