When Ducati’s original Diavel was revealed at the end of 2010, pretty much everyone thought the Italian firm had utterly lost the plot. It looked a bit like a cruiser, but packed a 160bhp 1200cc engine borrowed from the 1198 sportsbike and could accelerate, brake and go around corners in a way that completely surprised…
Harley-Davidson has been using just two engines and four frames to make hundreds of different motorcycles over the last few decades. The big-boned Touring, Dyna and Softail bikes have rolled along under a succession of “big twin” engines, the latest launching this week with 4-valve heads and a pair massive 900cc pistons to push their ever-increasing…
In many ways, the development and subsequent announcement of this motorcycle was an inevitability. More and more manufacturers are embracing platform sharing as a way to reduce both the costs and risks of bringing an extended range of models to market. After the tremendous critical and commercial success of the MT-09 and it’s half-faired version the Tracer 900,…
In 2009 Yamaha broke from accepted form by equipping their range-topping litre bike with a cross-plane crank, delivering the sound and power-delivery of a V4 in an inline-four package. For bikers bored with more than a decade of howling exhaust notes it was a breath of fresh air, adding a much-needed bit of aural variety. Since then, more road-oriented riders have…
So; Honda finally joined the Adventure Bike market for reals. What’s more, they’ve revived a historic name plate, the Africa Twin, to help them punch their way into the biggest, most popular, and most cut-throat competitive market motorcycling has seen in a decade. Time to see if the ADV segment has a new king, or just…
It’s been a while since I’ve ridden anything new, and that’s because I haven’t really been shopping. But the world’s motorcycle manufacturers won’t stop releasing new bikes, and while I now have my Triumph Street Triple R and Suzuki V-Strom 650 set up just the way I like them, I’m always half-heartedly scoping out…
Every now and again I’m reminded that the Crossrunner exists. Overlooked, it didn’t sell very well in it’s previous incarnation, being little more than a jacked-up VFR800, suffering from oddball styling and many of the same problems that plagued the 14-year-old design of its sport-touring cousin. But shortly after the VFR itself was overhauled, the…
