There’s little that can be said about the Honda CBR900RR that hasn’t been repeated in every forum, magazine, Craigslist post and lookie-there sportbike blog ad nauseam. By the standards of the day, they were a revelation. They were tiny, pinpoint-accurate handlers with big-bore power. For a few years in the Clinton era, there were few…
By every objective measure, the Suzuki TL1000R fell woefully short of its design brief over its six-year run, missing the mark as a world-dominating superbike, Yamaha R1 competitor and genre-defining street machine. Plagued by its porky waistline and relative lack of power, and dogged by horrifying tales of its disappointing rotary damper rear suspension, the…
This 1985 Yamaha RZ500RN is a bread-and-butter bike for us here at RSBFS. It’s an old, rare, iconic Japanese sportbike in excellent shape topped off with a few unique touches to separate it from the rest of its thin herd. What’s not to like? It has covered fewer than 5,000 miles (just over 7,000 kilometers)…
It’s hard to describe what the 1993 Honda CBR250RR meant to the riding masses to audiences in this country, as riders here have never been required to buy starter bikes before moving on to more powerful machines. If you can get your license and qualify for financing in the United States, whatever race replica you…
Little two-stroke rippers like this Honda NSR150 SP epitomize Honda’s 1990s golden age, when the company saw fit to make even their entry-level machines look and feel special. Even on a 150cc starter bike, Honda went all-out, giving it an RC30-aping single-sided swingarm, and a GP-replica Repsol paintjob. You might not be going as quick…
To celebrate its 50th anniversary. Yamaha busted out the paint booth and the option sheet to create a limited run of hopped-up versions of their R1 literbike. The 2006 Yamaha R1 LE delivered the perfect birthday present to the storied brand, showing that Japanese brands were indeed capable of and interested in building special versions…
Our pals at Iconic Motorbikes have come through once again with a surgically clean example of a classic sportbike we children of the 1990s lusted after in the bedroom wall poster days. This one is in excellent-but-not-perfect shape, and is a one-owner machine with fewer than 10,000 miles on it. It shows some minor scrapes…
Ah, the 1986 Suzuki GSX-R 750. There are plenty of reasons to love “slabbies,” from their awkward-but-functional bodywork that signalled a move to full fairings for the sportbike crowd, to their no-apologies approach to out and out speed, to the fact that decent ones are fast becoming prized collector bikes. This example is a clean…
