This is it. The end of the line. The last hurrah. The final countdown. The Ducati 900SS FE or “Final Edition.” Well, not really: 1999 saw the introduction of a brand new-ish, fuel-injected, Pierre Terblanche-styled SuperSport that carried over most of this bike’s strengths. But this is the very last of the old-school, carbureted SuperSports…
To the uninitiated, Honda’s alpha-numeric naming convention can get confusing, and it’d be easy to mistake this RS250R for something like a garden-variety NSR250R with a set of track-day fairings. But unlike the road-legal, race-replica NSR250R, the RS250R was a production race-bike, a Grand Prix machine in miniature. With the fairings removed, the elegant simplicity…
Much ink has been spilled waxing poetic about Massimo Tamburini’s masterpiece, the Ducati 916. The bike was such a common sight throughout the 90s as the two-wheeled incarnation of lust, it’s become a bit… familiar, and it’s easy to forget just how shockingly sexy this bike was when it was introduced: the incredibly slim waist,…
The Zane-era Laverda Ghost and Ghost Strike are extremely rare here in the USA. They were designed to fill the same niche as Ducati’s Monster and provide a profitable, parts-bin naked that would help put the struggling company into the black. The seller claims that the bike is “light, fast, loud, and powerful” and he’s…
Just so we’re clear: this 1998 Yamaha TZ250 is not to be confused with the road-going but also very cool TZR250. The TZ250 was Yamaha’s over-the-counter GP machine, a pure race bike. As such, “originality” is a relative thing, and these things have typically evolved over their racing careers with the goal of winning at…
1990s Bimotas currently represent an amazing value, and this 1998 YB11 Superleggera has superbike performance, Yamaha reliability, and is very rare, all for under $10,000. “Superleggera” or “super light” is a style of construction that stresses lightweight materials and construction: Ducati’s Superleggera is so super and leggera that it actually weighs less than the British Superbike…
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…
The 90s iteration of Ducati’s famous SuperSport wasn’t exactly a fast bike, even by standards of the day. And by the time the Ducati 900SS “Final Edition” rolled around, it likely appealed mostly to die-hard Ducati fans and collectors. Which is a shame because, although the 900SS didn’t offer cutting-edge performance, it did offer plenty…