“Homologation” refers to the process by which a manufacturer makes a particular machine eligible for production-based racing classes. In most cases, mass-produced motorcycles include significant compromises in terms of their materials, construction, components, and even geometry that seriously hinder their racetrack performance. You can’t sell every machine with radically oversquare bore and stroke, titanium…
A recent influx of Honda VFR400R NC30s means they’re in danger of not being nearly such rare sportbikes as they used to be… But relatively few were made for all markets, so there’s no real chance of them ever being a common sight, especially here in the US where they’ve only recently become legal to…
It’s arguable whether or not Ducati’s iconic Monster actually started the naked bike craze. Certainly, the Honda Hawk GT and CB-1 beat it to market by more than a couple years, but were relative failures and certainly didn’t spark the public’s imagination in the same way: being first to market doesn’t really mean much if…
The term “barn find” pretty much says it all: the collectible car or motorcycle in question was found sitting in an actual barn, where the previous owner stored it when it stopped running. Possibly hidden under a layer of dust, old blankets, back issues of Playboy, and mold. The implication is that it is in…
During the 1980s and early 1990s, the vibrant quarter-liter two-stroke class saw the NSR, RGV, and TZR go at it with knife-fight-in-a-phone-booth intensity. Notably missing from much of the action was Kawasaki. It didn’t help that Kawasaki didn’t start building a two-stroke sportbike until 1988 and abandoned the class in 1992, before the other Japanese…
Forgoing the elegance and class of the European sportbikes, Kawasaki’s unabashedly garish ZX-7R, or ZXR-750 as it was known in other markets, is splashed with jagged graphics in vivid green, white, and blue. Not a modern, metallic, beetle-green, of course. Kawasaki’s impossibly green green, with the un-self-consciously adolescent “Ninja” in fluorescent lettering splashed across the…
Made for just two years between 2002 and 2003, the Ducati 620 Sport was intended as an affordable way into Ducati ownership for riders more interested in the Ducati brand than in actual speed. But Ducati being Ducati, they were unable to build a sporty bike that actually handled badly, and they managed to create…
Update 3.27.2018: Contact Chris with your interest by email: cdavid@wddlegal.com Most of our readers probably think of Bimota as a manufacturer of overpriced two-wheeled status symbols dripping with billet and carbon fiber and Italian style. But Bimota originally took its name from founders Valerio BIanchi, Giuseppe MOrri, and Massimo TAmburini. Yes, that Massimo Tamburini. And…