It is curious that we don’t see more customs based on the Suzuki SV650 motorcycle.
There are no shortages of the middleweight-twin in the used market, the bike has good bones with what is becoming an iconic motor, and the platform is well-suited to a variety of purposes.
Take for instance here the Stoker STR SV650, which we spotted on Bike EXIF, as it is an attractive flat-tracking custom from Finish builder Antti Eloheimo.
It is no secret that motorcycle racers at the top of the sport use flat track as a way to hone their skills during the season. The practice dates all the way back to Kenny Roberts Sr., and has stayed in the grand prix paddock ever since.
Like all great champions though, Valentino Rossi has taken things to the next level, building his own private flat track course near his home in Tavullia, Italy.
When Portland-based wunderkind Andy DiBrino isn’t busy putting it on the box in the MotoAmerica Championship, winning the RSD Super Hooligans flat track series, coaching riders, or just kicking my ass up and down a race track in the Pacific Northwest, the 26-year-old can be found looking for speed in all of the wrong places.
This has led to Andy getting slideways in his backyard flat track and TT course, jumping road race bikes off big kickers, and most recently taking up four-wheeled drifting on local kart tracks.
So, it was only a matter of time before those two-wheeled and four-wheeled pursuits found their intersection, and would become Andy’s latest project.
Enter the HooliGhana – an exercise in motorcycle and car tomfoolery at one our region’s great treasures: The Ridge Motorsports Park.
To find out more about this creation, we sat down with the Zebra-loving man to get the scoop from Andy on his latest project, which to our knowledge is the first Gymkhana-styled video where the stunt driver and rider are the same person. Here’s what he had to say.
That Harley-Davidson has been working on a small-displacement motorcycle for street rider is not a well-kept secret.
The project involves a collaboration with Chinese motorcycle manufacturer Qianjiang Motors, but the fruits of that labor have been slow to reveal themselves.
Like many of Harley-Davidson’s planned future models, the alleged “XR338” is at best MIA, and at worst DOA.
No one seems to know the next move from Harley-Davidson, including the Bar & Shield brand itself, which has been extremely terse about the details of its “Hardwire” business plan.
To help nudge them along the way, A&R contributor Michael Uhlarik has been working with Italian design show Engines Engineering (E&E) on an XR338 flat track concept for the street.
When Harley-Davidson showed its design concepts for its future electric motorcycles, we were struck by the Bar & Shield’s plans for a road-going flat track bike…for two reasons.
For starters, the design and vehicle format seemed promising. In fact, it was surprising that it took an electric powertrain to get Harley-Davidson hip to its flat track roots and then apply them to the company’s street-bike offerings.
The second reason our interests were piqued was because of the bike’s very obvious use of Alta’s EV powertrain components, which made sense at the time since Harley-Davidson was a major investor in the electric motorcycle startup.
We have already talked about what the pint-sized Ohvale is doing for road racing, with the 24hp race bike lighting up go-kart tracks around the world.
Now, source again the 187cc single-cylinder engine from Daytona, and use that same “built for kids (but really adults)” form-factor, except this time build this creation for the flat tracking realm, and what you have is the Sunday Motors S187.
While the concept is pretty simple, it is the price point that really caught our attention, with the French outfit having two affordable models for consumption – the S187 ($3,300) and the S147 ($2,300).
It is here, finally. The Indian FTR1200 is arriving in dealerships in the next few weeks, which means that the motorcycle press can finally hop on this street tracker and talk about it.
But, we have already done that. Asphalt & Rubber was one of a few publications that got to ride a prototype of this machine back in October 2018, and since then we have seen countless outlets and social media darlings swing a leg over the Indian FTR1200.
Furthermore, racers already have the bike in their garages and are competing in the Super Hooligan National Championship series, and while the press launch for this bike was underway in Mexico, other outlets were busy getting exclusive tastes of the machine, including A&R.
So, while we are very excited to be the first to tell you how the new Indian FTR1200 does the business, this is very much a machine that has been in the sphere for quite a while, and thus is already a known quantity.
We didn’t let the hold us back too much, and I can confidently say that no other publication has spent more time in the saddle of the Indian FTR1200 S than us, getting to know every bit of this new motorcycle and where it takes the Indian Motorcycle brand. Let me explain.
Husqvarna is a sales-driven company. I know this because before our press ride, the (Austrian-owned) Swedish brand spent more time selling us on the company’s staggering sales growth rather than talking about the technical specifics on the new Husqvarna Svartpilen 701.
To that end, sales are good. Very good, in fact. For a point of reference, more Husqvarna motorcycles are being sold now than ever before in the brand’s extensive history, and some of that growth comes from the Husqvarna’s new entry into the street bike realm.
Don’t get me wrong, Husqvarna dirt bikes still out sell the brand’s street bikes by roughly 4:1 when we are talking raw numbers, but the revived company is knocking on close to 50,000 motorcycles sold a year now. That is impressive, no matter how you slice it.
The bike that they hope will push the brand over the 50k mark is the Husqvarna Svartpilen 701, which is the only new model from Husqvarna for the 2019 model year. The Svartpilen 701 is the counterpoint to the Vitpilen 701 that debuted last year, and it continues Husqvarna’s trend of releasing the mirror image machines in various sizes.
As such, the 701 series borrows its platform from the KTM 690 Duke, and its new single-cylinder engine that features dual balancing shafts (one at the crank, the other on the cam).
It is a motor we are quite fond of here at Asphalt & Rubber, so we were intrigued when Husqvarna invited us to Lisbon, Portugal to ride the new Svartpilen 701 – as we wanted to see if this motorcycle was just more than a re-skinned KTM.
The answer to that question is certainly a yes, but with an asterisk. Let me explain.
Greetings from Lisbon, Portugal as we come to our final destination on this three-week European press launch adventure. For this installment, we switch countries of origin, and get ready to hop on the Husqvarna Svartpilen 701 street bike.
A sort of street-tracker meets roadster type of bike, the Svartpilen 701 is a unique build from Husqvarna, and it pairs well with the company’s “white arrow” – the Vitpilen 701.
The plan is for us to get to know the Husqvarna Svartpilen 701 on the roads outside of Lisbon, riding along the coast for some twisties, touring along the highway, and doing some city miles in the urban jungle of Lisboa.
The route should give us a good idea of what to expect from the Swedish brand’s newest street bike, and to see if it is as fun as Husqvarna would like us to believe.
A few years ago, I had the fortune to hop on the Zaeta 530 SE for a quick romp. The eye-catching machine was stupid-fun, as it rattled just about every bone in my body. Beautiful, but completely unrefined, the lithe Zaeta was intriguing to me until I saw its $25,000 price tag. Ouch, on so many levels!
Too rich for my blood, too unpolished for my senses, but still very drool-worthy – the potential here was strong, and the small Italian brand was making strides on fixing some of the machine’s more troublesome gremlins.
The 528cc single-cylinder thumper (and it is a thumper!) is from TM Racing, a unique Italian brand in its own right, but the real highlight of the Zaeta was its CNC’d aluminum chassis, which was just gorgeous.
This made the 266 lbs machine a tough one to forget, so when I saw in my foreign news feed that the fearsome Zaeta was coming to the US for American Flat Track racing, I was quite excited…even more so when I saw that a twin-cylinder machine was also in the works.
Last Tuesday, KTM invited Asphalt & Rubber to Perris, California for the 2019 Red Bull/KTM Factory Racing Flat Track Team Introduction.
A mouthful, yes. But, with a title like that we couldn’t pass it up? Really though, Asphalt & Rubber at a dirt track event? Only later on the drive down would it start to make sense, perhaps a site like A&R is exactly who should be covering this event.
It dawned on me right where the 57 freeway meets the 60 freeway. The weight of what this factory effort in the sport of Flat Track Racing means. It has been years since we’ve seen a full factory team in a dirt track paddock.