Styled to resemble the RS250RF race bikes, the Honda NSR250 used a gorgeous aluminum twin-spar frame, triple disc brakes, and a whole host of lightweight, mass-centralizing tricks you’d normally expect to find on bikes with a much larger displacement. The NSR250 was motivated by a liquid-cooled two-stroke v-twin with two carburetors and Honda’s ATAC “automatic torque…
Bimota’s successful line of Ducati-powered bikes seems a bit unconventional for the brand, considering they’d always been about creating machines that fused powerful, well-engineered Japanese engines with lightweight, race-bred frames to create bikes that were more than the sum of their parts. But machines like this DB4 seemed to be more about just distilling a…
I’m really shocked there are any Honda Hawk GTs running around still so few miles on them at this point. After all, that’s kind of why you generally buy a Honda, right? So you can ride the hell out of it, without worrying about failing voltage regulators, expensive and frequent valve-adjustments, expensive parts… The bike…
Patriotic bike enthusiast, racer, and entrepreneur Erik Buell had a dream: to make an all-American sportbike. That would have been nearly impossible for a small-timer to do if he’d insisted on creating an engine from scratch to power the bike, so Buell took a proven, iconic American motor and stuck it into his new motorcycle.…
Although the American motorcycling community seems divided along impractical bikes at either end of the spectrum, journalists and riding enthusiasts long bemoaned the lack of real performance nakeds like this second-generation Aprilia Tuono: bikes that had the performance of a sportbike with all-day ergonomics. A bike you could ride to the twisties and then in…
With all the flack Pierre Terblanche gets for his futuristic restyle of the Superbike line, it’s easy to forget just why Ducati gave him a job in the first place. And while the 999 is finally beginning to be recognized for the design classic it is, bikes like his Supermono and today’s Ducati MH900e are there…
Starting with their DB1, obviously, and continuing through the present day, Bimota has a long history of using Ducati engines in their bikes. And while other Ducati-powered Bimotas have generally used the torquey but relatively low-power air-cooled versions of their classic v-twin, this Bimota DB7 is powered by the liquid-cooled, four-valve Testastretta version, which gives…
Ducati’s SportClassic line made a big splash when it was introduced in 2005 and included today’s Paul Smart 1000LE. Powered by Ducati’s torque-rich L-twin with modern suspension at both ends, they were mature sportbikes for riders with a sense of history, an eye for design, and an appreciation for accessible performance. Many will complain about…
