#videos

In spite of protestations from various peanut gallery season-ticket holders who claim disinterest, our mostly annual Superbike Comparison remains MO’s single biggest deal of the year when it comes to clicks and comments. Apparently, many people who don’t have much interest in owning any of these motorcycles are still really interested in riding them vicariously, which is fine by the MO staff; we’re willing to make the sacrifice, for a few weeks anyway. Whether you lust after one or not, it only makes sense to be interested in them, since this is where the new performance stuff turns up first, as motorcycles, like everything else, grow more sophisticated.

From the unchained environment of Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, where performance is the sole consideration for victory in our 2015 Six-Way Superbike Track Shootout, we move to the confines of public roadways to determine which superbike renders the best street-legal exhibition. As tight as our track test results were, the street shootout was just as close with a half-percent separating second from first place. If the MO offices were located in Florida, I’d demand a recount.

Rejoice, sportbike fans, as 2015 is bound to go down as the year of the liter-class superbike. After riding this latest crop of superbikes at their individual intros, your respective MO editors all came back gushing, proclaiming the bike they just finished riding is a viable contender for top honors in the class. Of course, with statements like that, pitting them all together and settling the score was the natural thing to do. And here for you now, we bring you the epic showdown you’ve long been waiting for, pitting five all-new or significantly revised superbikes on the racetrack against the Kawasaki Ninja ZX-10R, winner of our 2012 Japanese Literbike Shootout. Stay tuned next week for our street impressions.

Having just recovered from my 8th annual trip to the Isle of Man, and already planning for next year’s endeavor, it’s time to look back on what was, by any measure, one of the great TT fortnights in the storied 108-year history of the event. And, to premiere the 2015 edition of the Motorcycle.com TT Review video, five minutes of sights, sound and motion from the greatest motorsports event on Earth.

More than 50 city, county and municipal police departments now use police-spec electric motorcycles on the job, many of them as part of their traffic divisions – you know, those motorcycle cops who light you up and pull you over to write you a citation for something that you’re absolutely positive you didn’t do. “80 in a 25??? But officer, this old thing won’t even go 80 mph… ”

I have heard the future. And if you listen closely to the video snippet below, you will as well. It’s the whining sound barely discernable under the commentary on the loudspeaker and the beating rotors of the helicopter. That is John McGuinness rounding the corner at Creg-ny-Baa on his way to winning today’s Isle of Man TT Zero race, at a new lap record of over 119 mph. The snippet following that is of Lee Johnston on the Victory electric prototype. Johnston claimed third place at 111.620 mph, a stellar accomplishment for the American brand that is pressing forward into segments and markets virtually unthinkable just a few months ago. Johnston had been running increasingly faster laps throughout practice as he became more familiar with the bike, and he rode his fastest lap when it mattered most.

It’s kinda funny when I look back on it. Swanky downtown Los Angeles location, circa June 2013. Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres are served. Then someone finally pulls the wraps off the guest of honor: the early-release 2014 Star Bolt. Star employees beam with shameless pride about the new model bike that seems little more than a ripoff of the long-existing Harley-Davidson 883 Sportster.

Moto Guzzi flew us to its factory in Mandello del Lario on the shores of Lake Como to sample the two latest members of Guzzi’s popular California line of motorcycles. In this video, we take the Audace through its paces in the towns and mountains near Guzzi’s legendary facility.

We met up with Arvid Elias at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Washington, late on a Friday morning. The plan was to ride to lunch with a few of his petrol-powered pals, but only two showed up: The no-show claimed a dead battery as his excuse.

“Chock full of bland mediocrity” was the original subhead for my second ride review of the 2015 Suzuki GSX-S750. It was a subhead EiC, Kevin Duke, rightly removed. I was a little harsh on the new Gixxus, and now in a group of its peers, the naked bike from Suzuki has proven itself to be quite the contender. Out of the three testers involved in this shootout, John “run-on sentence” Burns and Troy “I’ve ridden the new R1 more than you” Siahaan, it is I who is championing the GSX-S.

The idea of a Kawasaki sportbike that costs $25,000 might seem incongruous. That’s the realm of Italian exotics and, though Kawasaki ends with a vowel, it’s not a swanky European marque that commands an exotic price tag.

From the title alone, there’s a good chance new riders are intently combing through each word of this shootout. The beginner bike market is one the manufacturers value dearly, and for decades Kawasaki has owned this corner of the market with its EX/ Ninja 250, and now the current Ninja 300. Honda finally followed suit in 2010, introducing the CBR250R as a 2011 model, and later, in 2014, the CBR300R as a 2015. Now the floodgates have opened, as both KTM and Yamaha have launched their own small-displacement sportbikes – the RC390 and YZF-R3, respectively – to try to grab a slice of that pie. If it weren’t for the crop of highly advanced literbikes coming out this year, a strong argument could be made for 2015 being the year of the entry-level sportbike.

This year marks the debuts of several remarkable new motorcycles tugging hard at the moto spotlight, and the most intense category is the literbike supersport/superbike category. BMW’s class-leading S1000RR has been updated and tested here. Yamaha offers a ground-up re-do of its R1 tested here, and it comes equipped with perhaps the most advanced electronic rider aids of any company. And let’s not forget Ducati’s awesome 205-horse 1299 Panigale tested here, nor the outrageous supercharged Kawasaki H2 tested here!

What makes a scooter a scooter? Is it the step-through frame? The completely hidden engine? The underseat storage? The clutch-free operation? We have here two radically different visions of scooters in the form of the Honda NM4 and the Yamaha TMAX, representing the different design intents of maxi-scooterdom. The NM4 looks like a futuristic scooter but rides like a cruiser. In fact, Honda lists the NM4 in the cruiser category on its website. The TMAX strives to be the sportbike of scooters with its aggressive styling and performance. What the pair do share is a price tag separated by just $509, with the NM4 costing $10,999 to the TMAX’s $10,490.

For as many benefits as electric motorcycles provide, to date there are still two areas preventing e-bikes from penetrating through to the masses: range and price. There’s not enough of the former, and there’s too much of the latter. Zero Motorcycles’ Senior Battery Specialist, Luke Workman, is dedicated to furthering the performance of battery technology. The results, then, would lead to ever increasing range at a price affordable by the masses.