Fully-faired sportbikes of the 80s and 90s from Japan are almost without exception festooned with jagged graphics, huge logos, hilariously technical-sounding acronyms, and retina-searing colors. They’re pretty cool now in a retro way and some of them, like the famous Rothmans designs, are truly iconic, but they feel like rolling billboards. Which of course is…
Look, here’s the thing. If you’re buying bikes [or cars, for that matter] that were hyped to be “instant classics” when they were introduced, thinking you can flip them for a profit… You may be waiting a while. Consider all the folks who bought the MV Agusta F4 750 Serie Oro when it was new,…
They’re relatively rare here in the US, even in states with lax registration requirements, but late 80s and early 90s quarter-liter two-strokes were pretty widely available elsewhere in the sportbiking world, considering their narrowly-focused role and limited audience. Kawasaki was largely absent from the intense class rivalry during that period, though. Their earlier KR250 was…
To some, it might seem like sacrilege to take a gorgeous, expensive, limited-edition Ducati superbike and turn it into a trackday toy. But if you’ve got the money to spend on something you can afford to wreck and want the very best, you can’t go wrong with today’s Ducati 1098R track bike. Honestly, homologation-special Ducatis…
Update 4.29.2018: Now on eBay as well for $12,500. -dc Bimota’s SB6R followed the earlier SB6, one of their best-selling models of all time, with approximately 1,200 made. The SB6R likely would have been produced in similar numbers, but for the debacle that was the radical, two-stroke VDue. That bike’s failure pulled the whole company…
The MV Agusta F4 750 is so often referred to as “one of the most beautiful motorcycles ever created” that it’s easy to forget it’s actually a pretty good motorcycle as well. Sure, it’s brutally uncomfortable and a little bit heavier than the competition, but the engineering is sound and it’s an impressively refined piece,…
If you’re a sportbike fan, bikes like the Ducati 748R might seem like the poor cousin to the 916/996/998, a bike you only bought because your funds wouldn’t stretch to the more expensive, larger-displacement version. But no “R” model Ducati really takes a back seat to anything: they were homologation specials, and the 748R was…
Suzuki’s RG500Γ “Gamma” is a modern classic, a bike from the tail end of the two-stroke sportbike era, at least here in the USA where lightweight, smoky strokers were gone by the mid-80s. At the time, it offered significant on-paper advantages over something like a GSX-R750: it was lighter and the 498cc engine made similar…