Back in the mid-70’s middle-weight motorcycles ruled the roost. The big four Japanese manufacturers were all competing in the same category and for the same audience: Young and New riders. Honda saw the need for a new attempt to capture their target audience and that came right at the end of 1977 for the 1978 … Read more
Here, Kurt tells how the Triumph Daytona 675 took on the Japanese Supersports and became an international success story for the British marque. Intro The year was 2006 and middleweight race replicas were all the rage. The big four were selling inline four screamers as quickly as they could get them into showrooms, Ducati’s polarizing … Read more
The 1975 Honda CB400F Super Sport is a motorcycle that divides opinion and has done since day one. On one side are those who believe it to be a gutless and under-performing machine compared to that of the larger motorcycles from the same time period including from Honda themselves; and on the other are those … Read more
If any of you have read any of my other Harley Davidson based articles you will already know I am biased when it comes to the Sportsters and particularly the Iron 883; so I am very excited to have the opportunity to write about one of the motorcycles that I absolutely love. This quote is … Read more
I think everybody who looks at the Yamaha FZR1000 should have a certain level of appreciation for what it did not only for Yamaha but for race-replicas and general sport bikes for the decade that followed its release. There would be no Thunderace and more importantly no legendary YZF R1 without the first Yamaha FZR … Read more
Anyone as excited as I am about Suzuki reviving the Hayabusa? C’mon I know I’m not alone! I remember seeing the first generation 1999 Suzuki Hayabusa up close and personal. It was love at first sight and I was barely as tall as the handlebars. It was the closest thing to a rocketship I’d ever … Read more
When the opportunity arose for me to write about the legend, the icon, the monster that is the Yamaha YZF R1 I couldn’t resist, I mean any motorcycle loving writer would be daft to turn down the chance. The Yamaha R1 has been in existence since 1998 and continues to develop, to push the limits … Read more
In 1984 Yamaha released a road legal version of their factory YZR500 which at the time was leading the world championship with Kenny Roberts aboard. The Yamaha RD500LC was born and all the crazy kids formed an orderly queue. Intro There was a very short lived period of time in the 1980’s when a small … Read more
Of the big four Japanese manufacturers, Kawasaki was the last to put into production a turbo charged motorcycle and I would say arguably the most successful. The ambition was to create a turbo charged middle-weight wonder that could compete with the fastest motorcycles out there. With the release of the Kawasaki GPz750 Turbo, they succeeded … Read more
The Kawasaki KZ650 (or the Z650 outside the US) was one of the most popular motorcycles of the 1970s. Affordable, quick, reliable and it made Kawasaki’s Z series accessible to those who didn’t want the full power or weight of the original Z1 or the later KZ1000 (Z1000). If you are anything like me, you … Read more
The Kawasaki Kz1000 was a motorcycle that set the bar for the litre capacity bikes that would follow. It was one of the fastest production motorcycles of the time and followed in the footsteps of the legendary 1972 Kawasaki Z1. Today Kawasaki is known for their fast, high-performing motorcycles but none of these would be … Read more
In the world of superbike racing, simply having the fastest machine will never be enough. Every manufacturer is constantly improving their bikes in order to stay on top, and sometimes that means utilising any and every loophole you can find in the rules. Many of the larger manufacturers do this with the homologation rule (to … Read more