Motorcycling history is littered with storied nameplates undone by economic changes, and many have tried and failed to resurrect those brands, but one of the enduring success stories continues to be Triumph. Sunk by a changing economy, a changing market, and an inability to compete with the reliable, affordable, high-performance bikes from Japan, Triumph’s long,…
Pantah Week continues with this very rare, and very oddly-styled machine. When you say “Ducati” to pretty much anyone, it conjures up images of sleek, exotic, often uncomfortable machines designed to win at all costs on track and inflame the desires of motorcyclists all over the world. What you wouldn’t normally imagine is something like…
Looking a bit like Aprilia’s Falco, the MZ 1000S was a high-end sport-touring motorcycle from a largely forgotten East German manufacturer that was powered by a big-bore parallel-twin engine. What could possibly go wrong? Well, not much really: as the seller mentions, parts to maintain the 1000S are available online, they’ve got a good reputation…
Mid-1980’s BMW was already planning around the end of the air-cooled era, and developed the 1-liter straight four for the K100. Marketing naturally wanted pizazz, and the response was the 16-valve K1, with bodywork achieving an unheard-of 0.34 drag coefficient. Controversial as all ground-breaking designs are, the K1 was fast if not quick, and gave…
While many of the 80s bikes we’ve featured recently look relentlessly forward, spending their lives on the bleeding-edge of sportbike design, other manufacturers were necessarily stuck in the past, limited by budgets and working to maximize the potential of existing, sometimes moribund designs like today’s Laverda RGS1000. Laverda had certainly earned its fair share of…
Note: likely a private sale, this auction was ended just before post time… Since the ST’s inception in 1998, the sport touring side of the Ducati line was a lot more sport than touring. Right from the ST2 the bikes went well and looked better without the bags than with. 2001 saw the 996cc desmoquattro…
An old joke about European heaven and hell ( in heaven the French do the cooking, the Italians romance, the British are the police, and Germans run the trains – you know what happens in hell ) came to mind when I read a review of the Laverda RGS1000, owners were so impressed by the…
Laverda’s big-bruiser RGS1000 comes from an era when the European brands were struggling in the face of the Japanese Big Four’s onslaught. To keep pace required serious levels of financial and manufacturing muscle, and most of the European brands just could not compete. Some, like BMW hung on to a niche market, with loyal sport-touring…