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…
Following on the heels of and offering a more practical alternative to the Tornado, the Benelli TnT offered up wide bars, weird naked insect styling, and big power. For a while, these were all over eBay, sitting unsold in dealers’ showrooms with slightly ridiculous asking prices, then with reasonable ones… Then they disappeared. I’m guessing…
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…
The result of a project originally intended to develop a Moto GP bike, the Foggy-Petronas FP1 is basically the roadgoing homologation version of the World Superbike GP1. Interestingly, while 100 of the 150 bikes made should have been available for purchase, it turns out very few were actually sold to customers. Several years ago, a…
A bit of a hulking dinosaur, even when new, this Laverda RGS 1000 lives at the transition point between the old and the new, as the European manufacturers were being eclipsed by the Japanese when it came to sports motorcycles. For a long time, they’d hung on by being able to out-handle the upstarts from…
Unlike many reinvented marques that attempt to trade on nostalgia, the resurrected Triumph knew they would be unable to compete head-on with the Japanese in terms of raw speed, so they created bikes like the Daytona and Super III to appeal to the heart with character and quality, while appealing to the head with real-world…
I have a contrary streak in me a mile wide and sometimes I like being different just to be different. I’ve owned Saabs and Alfa Romeos, both of which feature some really interesting design features that offer up alternatives to conventional thinking, although they don’t always work as advertised… And to me, the Honda NS400R…
Honda’s NSR400R was a snarling, two-stroke middleweight from an era of unprecedented experimentation; a three-cylinder, triple-piped sportbike with cutting-edge specifications. The 1980’s must have been a very discouraging time for European and Italian manufacturers. While they were barely hanging on by their fingernails, Japanese manufacturers were in the throes of an era of funky, experimental…