Not too many bikes look good in yellow, and that very short list is mostly made up of Italians, Ducatis in particular. Red may be the most traditional color for Ducatis but the 916, Panigale, and this 900SS/SP look so striking in the bold yellow seen here, especially with the half-fairing that reveals most of…
The Ducati Pantah 500SL was a watershed moment for the company, a bike that seems a little underwhelming at first, but actually launched them into the modern era, with practical updates to the classic v-twin engine and striking looks that are hard to date, if you’re not familiar with the bike. Compared to most Japanese…
Before the introduction of the class-breaking BMW S1000RR, the company wasn’t really associated with cutting-edge sportbikes, unless you go back a few decades to the R90S. After all, an air-cooled, 180° ” flat” twin with shaft drive is a pretty inauspicious foundation for a true performance machine. A flat-twin is obviously very wide, which presents…
I must admit, I’ve been sitting on the sidelines on this one. After the 3rd or 4th time around on eBay, I figured it was about time I wrote it up here (it was already on our Facebook site). After all, it is a freaking Krauser frame with seemingly pristine bodywork. That makes this a…
It’s not every day you see a 1986 Yamaha FZ600 restored to museum quality sporting a fuel tank that has never had gas in it. There are plenty of nice ones around, but their value isn’t commensurate with a full restoration, and most have been ridden enough to just be cool old-school riders. This one…
In a world obsessed with multi-cylinder madness, the Yamaha SRX was a breath of fresh air. Utilizing a XT600-derived air-cooled single cylinder power plant, the SRX series evoked simpler times of British cafe racers doing the ton. Impossibly light and narrow, the SRX was all about torque – squirting off of corners in a manner…
If you bought a mid-size two-stroke Yamaha streetbike in 1975, you got the very, very good RD350. You also got shortchanged, because buyers who waited just a year got the 1976 Yamaha RD400C, which Cycle World lauded as the perfect motorcycle, and which carried way more improvements than a simple displacement bump. 1976 Yamaha RD400…
The 1980s were wild time of experimentation. There was a technology explosion as liquid cooling, computerized fuel injection and other performance enhancers hit the scene. The sport bike battleground became a dizzying array of different configurations, each manufacturer vying for top honors on the racetrack and the showroom. Nowhere was this more evident than the…