Take a good look at it – this is the Suzuka 8-Hours race winning endurance bike that Jonathan Rea and Leon Haslam took to victory this year.
As with any endurance-spec race bike, this Kawasaki Ninja ZX-10RR is a very special animal, and one can pore over the photos here looking at all the interesting modifications that go into a Suzuka-winning machine.
For us, our eyes always go towards the quick-change wheels and brakes, but there are interesting items on every corner of the motorcycle.
For those that haven’t been keeping track on Asphalt & Rubber, the Brap Talk podcast, and on social media, we are spending more than a little bit of time at the track this year, racing with the Oregon Motorcycle Road Racing Association (OMRRA) to chronicle what it means to become an amateur racer.
I have already outlined my reasons for wanting to go racing, but I wanted to spend the next two article mentioning what I am racing with, both in terms of machinery and gear. First up is an introduction to our racing platform, which for this season is a Kramer HRK Evo2 S.
We have already talked about Kramer’s ready-to-race single-cylinder motorcycles, and in fact our race bike for this series is the same bike featured in that article’s story.
Previously a demo bike for Kramer in the Pacific Northwest, this “S” model machine found its home in my garage, and as you can see from the photo above, it has been on quite the journey since.
The Triumph Rocket III was already an absurd motorcycle, with its 2,294cc three-cylinder engine – the largest of any production motorcycle.
Well, the Brits are aiming for next-level insanity now with the Rocket name, debuting today the Triumph Rocket 3 R and Triumph Rocket 3 GT, which feature a 2,500cc triple that makes 165hp and 163 lbs•ft of torque.
That’s an 11% power increase over the previous generation, though just shy of the performance figures boasted on the Triumph Rocket 3 TFC that we saw earlier this year.
For a brief moment, the Yamaha Factory Racing Team was a five-time winner (in a row, I might add) at the Suzuka 8-Hours endurance race.
That reality was eventually snatched away by the FIM Endurance World Championship race direction officials, who this weekend learned something new about their rulebook, but the race run by the factory-backed Yamaha team was no less impressive.
For nearly eight hours, the team’s three riders (Alex Lowes, Michael van der Mark, and Katsuyuki Nakasuga) kept in check the best efforts by the Kawasaki Racing Team and Red Bull Honda squads, and it wasn’t until the final stint that Alex Lowes lost track of a raging Jonathan Rea.
Race day at the Suzuka 8-Hours has no shortage of pageantry. The crown jewel in the FIM Endurance World Championship, the Suzuka 8-Hours might be the most important race in all of motorcycling, and it certainly holds that distinction in Japan.
With all that said, this year’s edition was truly a spectacle, as the three factory teams from Honda, Kawasaki, and Yamaha fought in close-quarters the entire race, giving fans quite the treat.
With a few seconds or less between them for almost the entire eight-hour race, we saw no shortage of passes and strategy, making this a race well-worth watching.
Photos: © 2019 Steve English – All Rights Reserved
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Coming from the ashes of Confederate Motorcycles, the new Curtiss Motorcycles brand has shown another of its two-wheeled creations, this one also an electric model called “Hades” – after the Greek god of the underworld.
The creator of the Hades is none other than J.T. Nesbitt, who brings with him some of the same lines he made famous at Confederate. As you would expect then, the lines of the Hades are provocative, unconventional, and alluring.
When Dorna wished to start a new talent cup for European riders, it tapped the Austrian brand KTM to build the machine they would race and use to hone their racing skills. That machine is the KTM RC4R.
A four-stroke 250cc machine, the KTM RC4R is a step below the KTM RC250 R, which is used in the Red Bull Rookies Cup.
This makes sense, because the Northern Talent Cup (NTC) aims to find the top young riders from Northern and Central Europe, and feed them into the Red Bull Rookies Cup series, which will then hopefully jumpstart their careers into the grand prix paddock.
Photos: © 2019 Andrew Kohn / Asphalt & Rubber – All Rights Reserved
One of the highlights from the WorldSBK round at Laguna Seca was the unveiling of Bologna’s latest limited edition motorcycle, the Ducati Panigale V4 25° Anniversario 916.
An homage to the Ducati 919 Superbike that helped dominate the production-based series, the 1,103cc superbike was unveiled by Carl Fogarty himself, the man who took Ducati to four WorldSBK Championship titles.
Photos: © 2019 Andrew Kohn / Asphalt & Rubber – All Rights Reserved
