More Photos (And Thoughts) on the Aprilia RS250 SP

When I was putting together the story on the pricing for the Aprilia RS 250 SP race bike, I thought I had shared already some photos of the bike from EICMA, but that wasn’t the case.

I am not sure if that oversight comes from the madness of dozens of bikes being released at the same time; a complete lack of sleep for a week coupled to a nine-hour time change; or if simply the paltry number of photos I had taken was the cause of the gallery not going up; but it doesn’t matter. Here we are.

I do want to share these meager photos though (still in hi-def, of course), not so much because of how impressive the Aprilia RS 250 SP is as a race bike (especially now that we know it’s priced at €9,700), but because of the idea behind the machine. Here are some quick thoughts.

The real beauty of the Aprilia RS 250 SP is it shows the coordination of a country behind a common pursuit.

Italy is of course one of the epicenters for the motorcycle industry, and in the Aprilia RS 250 SP we see the Italian brands banding together to ensure that there is Italian road racing for years to come.

The Aprilia RS 250 SP is built for teenagers. It’s meant to be cheap (relatively) to purchase and maintain. The spec-series it will compete in is meant to showcase talent, not machine, with the hope of finding young talent that can then be developed by the Italian Motorcycling Federation (FMI).

Simply put, the Aprilia RS 250 SP hasn’t been developed to feed some immediate production quota or revenue goal. It has been built with a higher purpose in mind, and the bike shows it in its design.

The motor is a built-proof 250cc, four-valve, four-stroke design from Aprilia. It’s carbureted, not fuel injected. Why? Cost, mostly. There is also the hope that the lack of a fuel-injection system (and a ride-by-wire system…then traction control…the IMU…etc) would keep costs down, and setup easy to achieve.

Built by Ohvale (note, another partnership within a common geography), the RS 250 SP is flashy in all the right places, and subdued where it matters.

If you do some quick math on how much all the equipment on the RS 250 SP costs at retail (even at wholesale), you can see the incredible value that Aprilia and Ohvale have been able to achieve on this motorcycle.

€2,000 in wheels; €3,000 in suspension, €1250 in brakes, maybe €750 in the exhaust…that leaves €2,000 for the motor, chassis, bodywork, and the rest of it. Be certain, no one is making a euro on this motorcycle.

The power is modest, at 28hp, but then again, it doesn’t need to be anything special. The goal here isn’t to create competitive customer racer, the goal is to have a cheap race bike that teenagers and their families can afford and learn on.

All of these brands involved in the Aprilia RS 250 SP understand that they need to pay it forward if they want to continue to prosper from Italy being raving mad for motorcycle racing. They are playing the long game.

I sincerely hope that Aprilia makes the RS 250 SP available in other markets, so others can benefit from this simple idea.

There are plenty of machines in this category that can offer something similar, but as we have seen with America’s Junior Cup, the reliance on a multi-manufacturer racing formula quickly sidelines the hope of the competion being about the racers, and not the brands. Capitalism is great and all, except when it’s not.

I would offer that it would be a better approach for the sake of spotting America’s next grand prix champion, that if organizations like the AMA and MotoAmerica would take note and follow Aprilia’s suit, perhaps with American brands.

Now, that would be something