The Ducati 916/748 was the poster child for performance motorcycles throughout its production, with the same sort of ubiquity the Lamborghini Countach enjoyed in its heyday. With so many of them made over such a long timeframe, it’s easy to forget how huge an impact the bike had when it was new: Tamburini’s creation may…
A pure homologation special never intended for mass-production, the Yamaha YZF-R7 OW02 was a spiritual successor to the storied OW01 that took the fight to the famous Honda RC30 and the Ducati 851 Corsa featured this past weekend. But where the Honda used a different engine configuration than their more common mass production sportbikes and…
Introduced in Europe in 1981, the Suzuki GSX1100S “Katana” and its littler siblings like this rare, apparently very late-production GSX400S stunned the motorcycle buying public. A quick glance at bikes available from other manufacturers at the time shows us deep in the era of the Universal Japanese Motorcycle, and the Big Four were clearly following,…
In the late 1990s, manufacturers of sportbikes had basically given up on the v-twin like the one that powers this Suzuki TL1000R. Twins could still be found in smaller bikes, but serious sport machines had mostly moved onto the inline-four configuration. Except, of course, for Ducati and they probably stuck with it because they couldn’t…
In spite of its tiny displacement, by US standards at least, the Aprilia RS250 is not a toy. The RS50 on the other hand? Possibly a toy. But a very serious toy: this may have the displacement of a scooter and may not even require a motorcycle license endorsement in some states, but it’s a…
Well this is a cool bit of racing memorabilia, World Supberbike superstar Carl Fogarty’s race-winning Ducati fairing, hand-signed by Foggy himself. Not only was Carl Fogarty one of the most famous riders in World Superbike history as well as the most successful, this bit is from the bike he won his very last race on,…
Introduced in 1999 and sold for just two years, the exotic Yamaha YZF-R7 OW02 was the long-awaited successor to the OW01 of the late 1980’s, a barely-legal roadbike intended to homologate the R7 for World Superbike competition. But after just two years, Yamaha pulled the plug on the bike and their WSBK team as well.…
Much has been written about the little Aprilia RS250 on this site, about its “GP machine for the masses” character and handling, and its snarly little two-stroke v-twin borrowed from the Suzuki RGV250 and revised for improved power. Introduced in 1995 and produced in several iterations that were road-legal up until about 2002, the RS250…