Taking Italian suspension, style and bespoke build quality know-how and shoving it full of deadnuts-reliable and prodigious power from the other side of the Atlantic, or in this case the Pacific, is a time-honored tradition. In the ’60s, the likes of Bizzarrini and Iso executed the formula to devastating effect in cars. But Bimota ported…
The 1989 Suzuki GSX-R1100 earned a hairy reputation on their debut, as frame revisions or dodgy factory suspension meant their handling wasn’t what people had come to expect from the GSX-Rs, which even that early in their run had earned a sterling reputation. The handling was enough to scare some people away, but those who…
The 1982 Suzuki Katana is a beautiful example of a manufacturer using the time-honored tradition of raiding the parts bin to make a machine whose impact multiplied the sum of its parts. With its running gear filched from the GS line, the 1982 Katana was a race-bred little brother to the GS1100 bruiser, but it…
Bimota is known for taking the road less traveled – in order to travel that road faster and with more exclusivity. And while Bimota has had some brilliant successes and failures, it was the SB6R that promised mainstream potential. Housing a GSX-R1100 powerplant magically wrapped in aluminum and fiberglass, the SB6R weighed less than the…
Update 8.23.2019: This bike has sold to an RSBFS reader! Congratulations to buyer and seller! -dc I’m unreasonably fond of the Bimota SB6R, making me possibly the very best or the very worst person at RSBFS to write up this particular Featured Listing. It’s hard to explain why. It’s not the prettiest bike of the…
The 1991 Suzuki RGV250 SP2 was the baddest two stroke sportbike Hamamatsu was kicking out in the early ‘90s, with a dry clutch, wide-ratio box and fully adjustable suspension adding even more agility and precision to the little bike’s already lithe and precise nature. With 60-ish horsepower when uncorked and a shade over 300 pounds…
It’s not a new thing to scan a sportbike forum and find a subset of self-professed sportbike cognoscenti espousing the virtues of supersport 600s over literbikes for daily street use and getting the most out of yourself on a mountain road. The big bikes, they argue, are almost too much for most racetracks, let alone…
There are so many iterations of the Suzuki RGV 250 Gamma running around that you either need to be a savant to keep them all straight, or refresh yourself every time one comes up. There are VJ21s, VJ22s, VJ23s and a bunch of SP variants in between. Some are corked, some are uncorked, which means,…