Both a flamboyant racer and a cautionary tale, Anthony Gobert was a hugely talented rider who fell from grace after a failed drug test. Several times, actually. Racing today is obviously a far cry from the wild days of the 60s and 70s, where playboy racers partied with stewardesses well into the night before getting…
Although displacement was technically a bit more than a liter, the first generation Suzuki GSX-R1100 really established the modern literbike formula: take a big inline four engine, and squeeze it into a 600 or 750 sized package. The philosophy that created the iconic Gixxer was initially tried out with Suzuki’s GSXR400, and the result was…
Update: A reader reached out to note that, “The forks are missing the compression and rebound clickers, those are R forks.” Seller replied back to us, “I pulled out the books and it looks like the first year for the RS model was a 3XV8 which had the same forks as the standard R model.…
Hmmmmm, the text from the listing for this Ducati 900SS FE looks strangely familiar… One of the surprising things about having been writing these posts for the past few years is how often my words show up in sellers’ listings. I probably shouldn’t be encouraging folks to use my writing for free but, to be…
There are no points for second place. Unbeknownst to Kawasaki and Honda, both manufacturers were developing the Next Big Thing in the 1970s, an affordable, reliable, inline four-cylinder motorcycle displacing 750cc’s. Unfortunately, Honda’s CB750 was first to market by several months, leaving Kawasaki with the unenviable choice: be the also-ran, or delay their machine to…
It’s fitting that the last couple of Bimota YB4s we’ve featured have been race bikes, since the YB4 was a competition machine first, and a road bike second. In fact, only a racing version was built at first, until World Superbike homologation rules required 200 roadgoing examples be built. The YB4 competed head-to-head with the…
Bikes today are faster, lighter, better-handling, and safer than ever before. But while there have been huge advances in terms of electronics and the materials used to build them, they use basically the same layout and suspension since motorcycle design became codified sometime in the late 1980s. The familiar telescopic forks are most definitely a…
Honda’s two-stroke NS400R was ostensibly intended to capitalize on their Grand Prix racing efforts, but with less displacement and one fewer cylinder than rivals from Suzuki and Yamaha, it got lost in the shuffle at the time and suffered from a perceived lack of hairy-chestedness, compared to its 500cc competition. So why did Honda go with…