Jorge Lorenzo is the winner of yesterday’s Japanese Grand Prix at Motegi, tagging his second victory in the MotoGP World Championship. The Fiat Yamaha pilot has lead most of the race and fought with Valentino Rossi and Dani Pedrosa fiercely, but the two had to comply with second and third places.
Casey Stoner easily won the first MotoGP race of 2009 after leading the Monday night race from start to finish. The Australian pilot ended the race on the Losail International Circuit with seven seconds earlier than the second arrived, Valentino Rossi, managing so to impose himself as the third consecutive winner of the season-opener in Qatar. Third place goes to Jorge Lorenzo. > More
Ducati has just released the first episode of a design documentary about the legendary Ducati MotoGP replica. This is just the introduction so if it was aimed at determining us to eagerly wait for future episodes, it is a complete success.
The fans of Valentino Rossi are offered the possibility to create their own Rossi-like custom helmets on an AGV mini site that the helmet producer has put together specifically for this purpose. They wager on the fact that riders simply won’t abstain themselves and buy the self customized helmets featuring graphics of the helmet worn by Rossi during the Mugello 2008 GP race. Apart from that, there are also the plain white, black and silver GP-Tech schemes in the case that riders feel more inspired.
2006 MotoGP World Champion and Ducati’s latest recruit, Nicky Hayden has taken the time during the winter brake to help the Motorcycle Industry Council in the US promote safe riding among the nation’s armed forces.
The American pilot went to the Los Alamitos air base in Southern California to be part of a photo shoot to promote the safety campaign. The pictures (see the photo gallery) and video taken there will be used in all US armed forces bases in the US and across the globe as part of the safety campaign.
GP Motorsports builds motorcycle replicas with such accuracy that even the original designers would have troubles spotting the difference if there wasn’t for some minor details included willfully. Take this M1-replica that they’ve built out of a 2008 Yamaha R1 for example. The only details that set it apart from the original thing are the “R1” logo on the fairing and filler panels below the tank.
There isn’t much left of the original bike. In fact they only needed R1’s frame on which they started to add unique components such as the forks which have been taking straight off Carlos Checa’s 2003 GP bike. There is an Öhlins TTX shock and an R7 triple clamp, just to start your interest. Racefit have crafted the custom exhaust and Dymags provided the 16.5" carbon rims.
Featuring Superbike-spec, this replica costs approximately $65,000, but if customers can live without the racing engine and TTX suspensions, the price will be dramatically reduced to around $17,000 and you’ll get the same reaction from people with enormously less costs.
Igarashi Design has come up with basically a motorcycle robot concept that will supposable be able to match the performance of MotoGP bikes without any human being actually riding it. The work of computer graphics designer Yutaka Igarashi, this remote controlled motorcycle features a swinging boom instead of a rider while power comes from an electric motor.
As the charm of MotoGP consists in team work and riding skills, I can’t see how this concept would hack that with the amazing goal of beating the lap time of a MotoGP bike around a circuit that the innovative designer announced.
For 2009, the Yamaha YZR-M1 seems to have followed a relatively natural evolution based on the ‘why change it if it ain’t broken’ concept, Fiat Yamaha Team being more worried of what the competition is going to come up with as the winter’s ending is always a tense time of the year.
Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo will be working with a mind blowing power to weight ratio in 2009 and they seem pretty enthusiastic about their new bikes in the launch video that Yamaha-Motor-Europe has just released.
The funny thing in the Specs is that they don’t forget to mention ‘over’ and ‘in excess’ behind the horsepower and top speed figures.
It is hard to guess this year’s favorite Christmas present of the eight-time MotoGP World Champion Valentino Rossi, but it seems that a group of Italian fans from the Skydive Sport Center Tortuga in Arezzo, Tuscany get pretty close to what really matters: showing your appreciation. And when that happens at 3000 feet from the ground, you just can’t get enough of it.
It is now official. Aprilia will sell previous Grand Prix motorcycles ridden by Tetsuya Harada and Jeremy McWilliams in the 1999 and 2000 500cc World Championships. If you are a fan I probably don’t even have to mention that the bikes in case are RSW 500 V2 GP models and simply skip to the number of bikes and the prices.
Well, things complicate here as Aprilia doesn’t mention their financial demands, but do adds the fact that buyers will have to sign a contract in which they take the obligation of not divulging the technical details as they will continue belonging to the Italian maker, under intellectual property law.
Getting down to business, we find that only three are available:
The bike used by Harada in the 1999 season;
The bike used by Harada in the 2000 season;
The bike used by McWilliams in the 2000 season.
If you’re ready to spend some serious cash on one serious bike you can contact Aprilia here.
Picture Gallery
1 comment
RSS -
Webmaster free news |