Ducati’s Monster was a wonder of parts-bin engineering and basically saved the company from financial ruin, becoming the company’s best-selling model of all time by a healthy margin and bringing Ducati’s mystique to the masses. The four-valve superbikes may have won the glory but they were highly impractical for daily use, expensive to maintain, and…
If simply going fast is your thing, you probably don’t spend much time on this site. You went out and bought a Suzuki GSX-R1000, threw some sticky rubber, rearsets, and a Power Commander on it, then went out to dominate road and track, with stone axe reliability and off-the-shelf parts availability. But in a sea…
For years, Bimota was a byword for high-performance motorcycles that provided ultimate speed and handling. But recent offerings like this DB6R have seemed strangely… practical. This shift even carries over to the exotic Tesi that is available with a set of handlebars, instead of the expected clip-ons. Recent Bimota offerings have showed a clear shift…
While many of the 80s bikes we’ve featured recently look relentlessly forward, spending their lives on the bleeding-edge of sportbike design, other manufacturers were necessarily stuck in the past, limited by budgets and working to maximize the potential of existing, sometimes moribund designs like today’s Laverda RGS1000. Laverda had certainly earned its fair share of…
If you’re looking to import a rare and unusual vehicle that was never intended for the US market into the country like today’s Yamaha TZR250, there are a few ways to go about it. Some of these desirable machines can be found in Canada, and others can be found already here in the US, imported at…
Update 8.26.2016: Sold! Congratulations to buyer and seller! -dc Far less common and cliché than the 916, the Ducati 851 represents the connoisseur’s choice for Ducati fans looking for a classic superbike. Although it’s hard to argue with the significance of the 916, it’s almost a victim of its own success. I mean, nearly the…
Introduced in 1986, the Yamaha TZR250 was the follow up to their RD family of sportbikes. Yamaha’s first go at a quarter-liter TZR had middling success: it wasn’t especially competitive next to more focused rivals from Kawasaki and Suzuki on track, but it was a far better roadbike. The TZR followed the standard two-fiddy two-stroke formula of…
Kawasaki’s ZX-7 Ninja was known in other markets as the ZXR750, although I’m really not clear on why. Calling your “Fireblade” a “CBR900” makes plenty of sense if your target audience is more excited by technical names than by evocative ones. But shuffling a couple letters and numbers around doesn’t send a very different message……