Given a clean sheet of paper and nearly unlimited resources, it’s no surprise when major manufacturers come up with good motorcycles. In fact, when you consider those factors, it’s shocking how often they get it wrong… But Buell had neither advantage in building his motorcycles and still managed to come up with some very interesting…
Here in the USA where torque, big, low-revving engines, and straight-line speed were the order of the day, corner-shredding 250cc race-replicas never stood a chance of being popular. But you always want what you can’t have, so quite a cult has grown up around bikes like this little Honda NSR250R. Powered by a reed-valve, liquid-cooled…
Ducati’s 750 F1 was intended to closely resemble their competitive TT1 racebike, and was the very last bike introduced before the company was taken over by Cagiva, when Ducati was on the ropes financially. It was the very last of the old-school Ducatis, and is finally starting to find its value because of that. The…
Look, I’d really buy this Ducati Sport 1000SE just for the insanely cool 2-into-2 high/low Zard exhaust and get a pretty nice bike thrown in for free. Because if I had the money and space to collect a bunch of bikes, the Sport 1000 would be on the list, and I’d want one with this…
Bimota made their name building lean, spare, race-oriented bikes with only the barest nods to streetability. So the DB3 Mantra was a bit of a left-turn for them, as it was purely meant to be a road bike and had no track pretensions. Unfortunately, released from the requirement to make the bike aerodynamic for speed…
It was clear that Ducati had a lock on the “sexy v-twin” market in the mid-90s, selling basically every 916 they could make at a very premium price. But, aside from the funky, springless valves, they weren’t really offering anything all that innovative, and Suzuki figured they could do something much better for cheaper. And…
At some point, you may get to thinking, “These modern sport bikes are going to kill me.” It’s a pretty logical conclusion. It’s bad enough we have to dodge car drivers on cell phones, off-leash dogs, deer, moose, apparently coyotes… We have to watch out for road debris, sand, rocks, wet leaves, and sometimes discarded…
Bike’s like Aprilia’s high-strung RS250 two-stroke is really this website’s raison d’être: specifications that speak to an almost single-minded pursuit of speed, race-bred bodywork, rarity, and an exotic nameplate. The icing on the cake is that the RS250 is relatively attainable, if you are willing to accept the compromises inherent in such a focused design.…