The tragic death of 13-year-old roadracer Peter Lenz at Indianapolis Motor Speedway this past August created national headlines. At the MotoGP post-race press conference, local reporters hammered second-place-finisher Ben Spies for answers. One newsman suggested that the Speedway was “too difficult for someone 12 or 13 years old to navigate.” Appearing on Fox News, “children’s-rights advocate” Wendy Murphy called for an investigation.

“Honestly, the questions I was asked earlier were a bit aggravating,” Spies said after the press conference. “I’ve been racing since I was eight years old. When I was 14, I lost my best friend—my teammate. There was about two days where I thought, ‘What am I doing? Should I be doing this?’ My mom told me, ‘If you want to quit right now, even being $70,000 in debt, we’ll find a way to survive.’ There isn’t a day that goes past that I regret doing it. When you’re racing motorcycles, you know what can happen. Obviously, what happened today is unfortunate. But it’s racing. It’s life. He knew exactly what he was doing.”

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Photo by Marc Urbano

Prior to the start of the current MotoGP season, 1993 500cc World Champion Kevin Schwantz was asked if three-time AMA and reigning World Superbike Champion Ben Spies would win a race in his rookie year. Absolutely, replied Schwantz.

Now, with more than half of the season complete, Spies has one pole, two front-row starts, a pair of top-three finishes and is sixth overall in points, just behind reigning and former class champions Valentino Rossi and Casey Stoner. Victory, however, remains elusive. Following Spies’ pole-winning, second-place performance at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, I asked Schwantz to assess the 26-year-old Texan’s season to date.

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Nitro Nori Haga

Ducati and World Superbike. World Superbike and Ducati. The two went together like Ozzie and Harriet, Lucy and Ricky. Now it’s Tiger and Elin.

For the first time since the World Superbike Championship began in 1988, there won’t be a factory Ducati team in the series in 2011.  The announcement came today from Bologna.

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Every motorcyclist has likely experienced the frustration of being stranded at a traffic signal that hasn’t detected your bike’s presence. When this happens, your options are to wait at the intersection until a larger vehicle arrives to trip the signal, or take your chances in running through a red light. Gasp!

That second option can be costly on many levels, so I’ll recommend checking out this informative WikiHow article pertaining to our very plight; How to Trigger Green Traffic Lights. Now you’ll be armed with a few tricks to try the next time you find yourself stuck at a stubborn signal.

Here’s how to follow along as riders in MERA’s 10-n-10 Rally hit the road.

As I sit here in my Salt Lake City Hotel room reviewing my planned route for the Motorcycle Endurance Riders Association’s first-ever 10-n-10 Rally one last time, it occurs to me that my three previous installments in this series overlooked one of the coolest parts of this 10-day/10,000-mile celebration of motorcycling masochism.  Namely, the little orange Spot satellite-tracking units most 10-n-10 Rally competitors will be using to help rallymaster and MERA founder Steve Chalmers—not to mention our friends and loved ones back home—keep tabs on us during the event.

While this nifty little GPS-based communication gizmo has undeniable safety benefits—not the least of which is its ability to summon help in an emergency in all those places in this country where cell phone signals are virtually nonexistent—it’s the gee-whiz factor of Spot’s Track Progress mode that most intrigues me.  While folks have been riding these kinds of endurance rallies for more than 20 years, this is the first time the public can follow competitors progress in real time on a Spotwalla-powered Google map.

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This press conference transcript with Ducati CEO Gabriele del Torchio sheds a little more light on Rossi’s move to Ducati. Will Vale arrive with the man who engineered his victories at Honda and Yamaha, not to mention championships for Freddie Spencer, Wayne Gardner and  Mick Doohan? Our inside source says Jeremy Burgess will also be making the move to Ducati, though del Torchio neither confirms nor denies…

The transcript:

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How do you safely transport Grand Prix racing history cross-country from California to Indiana? Strapped-down securely in a plain-wrap van, of course!

The two-stroke V-Three KR3 and four-stroke V-Five KR5 designed and built in Banbury, England, by two-time AMA Grand National and three-time 500cc World Champion Kenny Roberts are wending their way to the Hoosier state. Both bikes will be on display during the Red Bull Indianapolis Grand Prix weekend, August 27-29. After the event, the as-raced machines will move to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, where they will be shown in all their track-ready glory during the coming year, possibly longer.

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The one thing that matters more to competitors in MERA’s 10-n-10 Rally than a strong finish.

When the 35 men and women entered in the Motorcycle Endurance Riders Association’s inaugural 10-n-10 Rally roll out of our Salt Lake City hotel’s parking lot next Thursday morning, each of us will be attempting to ride a minimum of 10,000 miles in just 10 days.  Which, in case you don’t keep track of such things, is roughly four times the number of miles the average motorcyclist racks up in an entire year.

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Mostly because by then he’d made a lot of money racing Kawasakis, racing snowmobiles, investing in hotels, selling tires, T-shirts and trinkets–and he was just about done with the racing Kawasakis part of it.

Excerpt from a Joe Scalzo interview with Duhamel, Cycle World, November `75:

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Photo by Tim White/www.tswphoto.smugmug.com

Connecting the final pieces of the puzzle can be precarious. It’s the big commitment part that brings together the final scene, and that is where we are right now with Team Cycle World Attack Performance Yoshimura Suzuki. Our steady forward progress has been hindered by relatively few mishaps, but closing the gap to the front in the short time frame we have with this project will be difficult. 

Coming into the doubleheader race weekend at Virginia International Raceway, we were indeed hoping to race at the front, but we also knew that we would have to step up the commitment/risk factor to do so. The problem for us is, at this point in the season, the competition is riding on a confidence high while we are still in the building phase. Now that I am riding with the speed to follow the front-runners, it’s clear they are able to “will” their motorcycles into unbelievable situations and make time doing so. It’s time for me to step up to a risk zone into which I have not yet ventured due to my short time on this GSX-R1000. 

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Photo by James Wirth

After much speculation and the “confirmed/not-comfirmed” recent interview with Ducati CEO Gabriele Del Torchio on cycleworld.com, Ducati has officially announced its formal relationship with MotoGP superstar Valentino Rossi “from 2011.”

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Today, the Grand Prix Commission, acting at the Brno GP in the Czech Republic, voted unanimously to confirm what had previously been under discussion, as follows: 

MotoGP class for 2012

Technical specifications (as already announced 2/17/10)

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Eric Bostrom finished seventh in today’s AMA Pro American SuperBike race at Virginia International Raceway. Up front, Rockstar Makita Suzuki rider Tommy Hayden made a last-lap draft pass to beat Bostrom’s older brother, Ben, riding a Pat Clark Motorsports Yamaha YZF-R1, to the finish line by .005 seconds. Team Graves Yamaha’s Josh Hayes, who led most of the 23-lap event, was a close third.

Bostrom, who won the Superbike race at VIR in 2002, used the waning seconds of  final qualifying on Saturday morning to post the fourth-quickest time of the session–good enough for the final spot on the front row alongside Hayes, Hayden and his pole-sitter brother, Ben. This was a significant improvement from Friday, when, during morning practice and afternoon qualifying, Bostrom hovered just inside the top 10 as he struggled to refamiliarize himself with the rolling, 18-turn, 2.25-mile racetrack.

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Making a good long-distance bike better.

While the field for the Motorcycle Endurance Riders Association’s 10-day/10,000-mile 10-n-10 Rally includes bikes from nearly every major motorcycle company, walk through the parking lot outside our Salt Lake City hotel on the morning of August 26th and you’ll find as many Yamaha FJR1300 sport-tourers in the lineup as any other single model.

The reasons for the Feejer’s popularity among hardcore long-distance riders boil down to its unique balance of performance, handling, fuel economy and reliability. As for the FJR AE model Yamaha loaned me for this event, I’ll admit that its complete lack of a clutch lever took some getting used to.

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So, you like engines, eh? If so, you really need to check out this website: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gordoncalder/sets/72157612757443903/show/.
It’s a series of more than 100 gorgeous photographs of motorcycle engines, from the legendary to the obscure, from the exciting to the mundane, from the bone-stock to the wildly modified. All the finished pictures are the work of Gordon Calder, who either photographed the engines himself or obtained suitable shots from other sources, then Photoshopped all of them to remove the host frames and gas tanks, etc., leaving only the pristine engines themselves showcased on black backgrounds, such as the pre-unit 650 Triumph Twin pictured here. The result is a striking slide-show presentation that will keep true motorheads glued to their monitors.

Calder generally provides a brief explanation of each engine, often along with the date and place when and where the photo was taken. He offers prints for sale of many of the engines, mostly those for which he owns the photographic rights. He also provides links to many of the original photos, giving you some idea of the tremendous amount of work that went into creating the finished images.

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