Looking very much like a little brother to the RG500, this Suzuki RG250Γ offers up sophistication to match its larger stablemate: anti-dive forks, Full Floater suspension, Suzuki’s Automatic Exhaust Control that increased the weedy two-stroke midrange, and a six-speed gearbox. The package was very light, weighing in at 286lb dry and the water-cooled 247cc parallel…
What looks good doesn’t always work well: some of the most beautiful cars ever built were created by eye, without the aid of modern aerodynamics. Sleek machines like the Jaguar E-Type and the Corvette Stingray may look impossibly fast, but often try to leave the road at elevated speeds… Racing machines on the other hand…
Obviously, there are “rare” motorcycles that don’t cost an arm and a leg to own and, although there are plenty of affordable Ducatis, Aprilias, and even Bimotas that appear on this site, not everyone wants to own an Italian exotic or lives near a shop that can work on their baby. So if cash is…
Although the American motorcycling community seems divided along impractical bikes at either end of the spectrum, journalists and riding enthusiasts long bemoaned the lack of real performance nakeds like this second-generation Aprilia Tuono: bikes that had the performance of a sportbike with all-day ergonomics. A bike you could ride to the twisties and then in…
With all the flack Pierre Terblanche gets for his futuristic restyle of the Superbike line, it’s easy to forget just why Ducati gave him a job in the first place. And while the 999 is finally beginning to be recognized for the design classic it is, bikes like his Supermono and today’s Ducati MH900e are there…
As is always the case with exotic machinery, a simple truth-in-advertising name sounds so much better in Italian… Oooooh. A Maserati Quattroporte… That sounds so sexy. Wait, it just means “four doors”? You’re saying that the name of that four-door Maserati is “Maserati four-door”? The same thing is true for Ducati’s GP6-based Desmosedici D16RR road…
Aside from the disastrous VDue, Bimota’s stock-in-trade was wrapping lightweight frames and fantastically exotic bodywork around reliable powertrains from established manufacturers. The magical formula that led to bikes like the Bimota SB6 seems so simple, it’s a wonder it took so long for other manufacturers to catch on: wrap too much engine in too little…
I wouldn’t normally post something so relatively common on a bike about “rare” sportbikes, but this particular 1998 Yamaha YZF-R1 is strikingly clean and low mileage, the kind of bike speculators or collectors might soon be snapping up. Japanese sportbikes offer performance, reliability, and ubiquity in equal portions. That’s kind of the point: you can…