By the early 1980s, inline four engines went from being exotic and relatively rare to being widely available, even ubiquitous, at least among the Japanese manufacturers. Inline fours have more moving parts and that adds weight and complexity, big no-nos for motorcycles that historically relied on simplicity to keep weight down and minimize parts that…
Ducati’s two-valve “Desmodue” may not be the most powerful engine, or the lowest-maintenance, but there’s a reason it’s stuck around from the 1980 Pantah all the way through to today. Besides the obvious budgetary reasons: some of that tooling is probably long paid off… Joking aside, today’s Desmodue is heavily evolved, compared to the original…
With the general level of competence from modern sportbikes, along with rules that don’t seem to favor limited-production homologation bikes, it’s easy to forget just how special some of them are. Bikes like the Yamaha OW01 might have looked nearly identical to the regular production machines from ten feet, but were often hand-built to a…
This is an unusual opportunity to buy a rough-and-tumble, forged-in-fire vintage racing Laverda. If you’re searching for a display piece to adorn your Manhattan loft, you should probably look elsewhere. This SFC-spec SF2 was made to run, and run hard. It’s all killer and no filler, built to race. Period. The original SFC is one…
After years of “close, but no banana” attempts to out-inline-four the Japanese with their 600cc TT600 and Daytona, Triumph finally hit one out of the park with their slim, agile, and characterful Daytona 675, a bike capable of holding its own against the world’s best, while offering a unique blend of flexible power, torque, and…
Largely forgotten now, especially by modern sportbike enthusiasts, Laverda was once a serious player in the Italian sportbike scene of the 1970s. In terms of reputation, anyway, if not in actual production numbers. Their big-bore parallel-twin was supposedly heavily “inspired” by Honda’s parallel twin design of the period, and Laverda’s grown-up engine was heavily overbuilt…
I’m a huge Laverda fan, so it’s disappointing their attempted resurrection in the 1990s didn’t work out. It wasn’t that bikes like this Ghost Strike weren’t any good: the beam frames were designed by the famed Nico Bakker and handling was generally considered excellent, even superior to Ducatis competing in the same segments. The standard…
Compared to a modern superbike, the fire-breathing performance of vintage two-stroke race replicas maybe isn’t quite as wild as their reputation would suggest. At the time, they were light and very powerful, but weren’t exactly at Grand Prix extremes of either even then. Modern machines have levels of rigidity, suspension response, and electronic assistance an…