Innehållsförteckning för December 2015 från Cycle World

Motorcycling is just about as good as it gets for a movie topic. In the decades since motorcycles and film have coexisted, there have been some magnificent pieces made—Easy Rider, Faster, and On Any Sunday marking just a few of the truly great ones. Thanks to the proliferation of affordable cameras, editing tech, and ease of publishing, we have a new era of creative people using motorcycles to tell stories of life, love, and adventure. I was honored this year to be a judge at the third annual Motorcycle Film Festival in Brooklyn and screened about 30 films both short and long. The MFF was first conceived by Corinna Mantlo and Jack Drury, with our Custom & Style Editor Paul d’Orleans thrown in the mix as chief judge. One of…

Honda has a rich history of World Championship-winning technical achievement. It has also periodically offered the very best of its race-derived innovation for public consumption. Take the oval piston NR750 and exotic V-4 RC30 and RC45 models. They have fueled the aspirations of many if only fulfilling the fancy of the financially affluent few. It’s been quite some time since we’ve witnessed such a collaborative flagship machine from Big Red and its Honda Racing Corporation, but the $184,000 RC213V-S street-legal MotoGP replica has brought an end to this dry spell with all the subtlety of a major tsunami. I was among four American motojournalists in attendance at an international press ride of the exclusive machine staged at the Circuito Ricardo Tormo located in Valencia, Spain, and site for the MotoGP…

Look at the new Triumph Thruxtons, and you see thoroughly updated modern classics, machines that embrace the appearance and aesthetics of café racers that were new a halfcentury ago. But if you look hard enough, you can also see something else: The new Triumph Motorcycles Ltd, John Bloor’s Triumph, embracing the heritage of the defunct Triumph Engineering Company, the original Triumph, in a way that it has never done before. Baby boomers still remember when Triumph’s Bonneville was the superbike. The 650cc pushrod twin got its name from setting speed records on Utah’s famous salt flat, and it was arguably the fastest production motorcycle of its day. It inspired Harley to bring out the Sportster, it won the top English production class race (the Thruxton 500), it eventually won the…

What’s always welcome in a cruiser? Yep, more power. Which is precisely what the Softail Slim S and Fat Boy S have received for 2016. Harley has significantly upped the performance quotient of these Softails by equipping them with the Screamin’ Eagle Twin Cam 110ci V-twin, an air-cooled engine formerly reserved for the CVO models. Harley had both bikes on hand at its 2016 press introduction, including an Olive Gold Denim Softail Slim S with a big white star on the tank. While this bike has a cool military look (reminiscent of the WLA military models from WW2, says Brad Richards, Harley’s director of styling), I spent my time on a new Fat Boy S, a blacked-out model with disc wheels, dual shotgun mufflers, and the same Softail chassis with…

GPS is making me stupid. The problem is, when using it I’m never lost, but at the same time I have no idea where I am. GPS has eliminated that annoying necessity of being aware of reality. When I use GPS, some lady I’ve never met tells me where to go. If I do what she says, I magically arrive at my destination. But no longer is there a landscape of identifiable locations between here and there, between where I began and where I end up. A destination is no longer a place with a comprehensible spatial relationship to a point of origin; it’s a rabbit in a magician’s hat. GPS is the magician. I’m a dupe in the audience. If I listen to the lady, eventually she shows me…

Weird things you notice getting on the H2 and taking a ride for the first time: The engine cranks longer than most new bikes before it starts. The idle has a loping growl, as though it is disinterested in that mode of operation. In certain light, the LCD information display is impossible to read. If you are 6-foot-2 like me, your hands are lower than your knees, like a sprinter ready to fire out of the blocks. The non-assist slipper clutch has a firm lever and great control. Also, there is an ECO mode. The little icon pops up when idling along with the butterflies barely cracked, indicating the bike’s most efficient operation, because there is nothing like saving the planet on a 190-hp supercharged motorcycle. I admit to riding…

When we first got a chance to throw a leg over the 2015 Yamaha R1 at the bike’s press launch at Sydney Motorsports Park in Australia, it was pretty much love at first ride. This was only reinforced when the “M” won the track portion of our September Turn & Burn shootout and then backed it up with a Ten Best award. So the R1 was an ideal candidate for a longterm evaluation. Instead of choosing the $5,500 more expensive R1M, we decided the standard R1 would offer more aftermarket opportunities. At the top of our list, we wanted to increase power to compete with the BMW S1000RR and clean up the mapping a bit. So far, we’ve tried out a CARBlegal Yoshi mura slipon exhaust from Yamaha, but while…

“Tuono” used to mean only “thunder” in Italian. But ever since Aprilia applied the name to its first stripped superbike—the 2002 Tuono, a less-faired RSV Mille—it has also meant kick-ass naked bike. Every Tuono since the first has been massive fun and big thrills mixed with a dose of practicality rare at such a high level of performance. A year ago we picked the BMW S1000R as the winner in our Year of the Naked issue (August ’14). The then-new Bavarian bomber went up against an alsonew KTM 1290 Super Duke R and a carryover Aprilia Tuono V4 R. And while there was much to love about the Tuono—a former CW Ten Best winner—we also pointed out a few areas in which the competition had gained an advantage in performance…

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