#Aprilia

Just announced at EICMA 2016 is this, the Aprilia Dorsoduro 900. For 2017, Aprilia’s maxi-motard will enter the new year packed with even more muscle thanks to a generous displacement bump of its V-Twin engine from 750cc to 900cc (well, 896cc to be exact). Aprilia’s goal was to provide the Dorso with a healthy increase in bottom-end and midrange power, doing so by taking the old 750cc engine and increasing the stroke from 56.4mm to 67.4mm while keeping the bore the same at 92mm.

Aprilia’s Shiver first hit the scene in 2007 as a 750cc middleweight naked, but it struggled to gain much attention in the marketplace. A decade on and Aprilia has finally seen it fit to give the Shiver some love, and it’s done so in the best way possible: giving it more power. Introducing the Aprilia Shiver 900, unveiled today at EICMA 2016.

It’s that time of year again: New Bike Season. We’ve already gotten a taste of what’s to come in 2017 thanks to the Intermot show in Cologne, Germany, and AIMExpo in Orlando last month, but when we really want to drool over what awaits us in 2017, EICMA is the show to pay attention to. No less than 30 companies will be making big announcements over the course of the three days that span Nov. 7-9, and our man Evans Brasfield will be on the ground in Milan covering the action as it happens. He’ll even be shooting some video footage we’ll post right here on these pages.

Sunday’s Michelin Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix was about what one would expect from a great track after the championship had been decided. Anointed champion Marc Marquez, on the factory Honda, having given a clinic on Saturday to take pole, obliterated the field early, apparently on his way to an easy win. Until Lap 10, when he apparently lost focus, pushing harder than necessary, folded the front in Turn 4 and handed the win to the ascendant Cal Crutchlow.

Two of MO’s favorite motorcycles are getting minor but notable revisions for 2017, as Aprilia today announced the RSV4 (both RR and RF) and Tuono V4 1100 (both RR and Factory) will be seeing a list of upgrades.

Soon we’ll be assembling the combatants for our third naked bike shootout this year. Why another one? Because Yamaha’s new FZ-10 is forcing our hand. Our First Ride Review of the FZ-10 was published at the end of July, a mere week before our Naked Sports Six-Way Shootout hit the digital newsstand in early August. Prior to that, our 2016 Ultimate Streetfighter Shootout between the two reigning kings of the naked bike world – Aprilia and KTM – was published all the way back in April. Leaving the FZ-10 as ridden but not juxtaposed.

For many, Autumn is the beginning of the end of another riding season. But for any motorcycle enthusiast, Autumn is also the time of the year when we see the fruits of R&D departments being unveiled, enticing us with fresh motorbikes that we’ll be anxious to ride in the year ahead.

Triumph’s efforts at reinventing the Bonneville platform (which includes the Street Twin and Thruxton along with the T120 Bonneville) deserve huge kudos. It’s one thing to create a terrific new motorcycle that meets contemporary emissions and performance standards, but it’s another to do so while making the bikes look almost like they stepped out of a showroom from 50 years ago. They appear more authentically retro than the previous air-cooled generation, which is a massive accomplishment for bikes with contemporary liquid-cooled motors.

Twenty fifteen was a big year for sportbikes, with the new Yamaha R1 and a heavily revised BMW S1000RR and Aprilia RSV4 RF making their debuts – the two European weapons motoring their way to the Best Sportbike and runner-up awards, respectively, in last year’s Sportbike MOBOs. With the proverbial load being blown that year, there wasn’t much excitement in store for 2016, save for the new, heavily revised Kawasaki ZX-10R. The Green Machine is a good literbike, no doubt, but it still wasn’t a match for the year-old Aprilia RR (the “base” model RSV4) when we put the two $17,000 machines against each other.

This category is one of our favorites here at MO, and it proved to be the tightest contest of our 2016 MOBOs – we initially decided to give it the second tie in the eight-year history of MO’s annual Best Of awards. After all, our recent face-off between KTM’s Super Duke R and the Aprilia Tuono 1100 Factory was a virtual tie, with their scores separated in our rankings by just 0.1%! And, in pure subjective terms, our two testers were divided.

Who crams a V-Twin into a dirtbike frame, anyway?! Aprilia, that’s who, and in 2005 it just happened to cram a highly oversquare 77-degree V-Twin into not one, but two(!) different models: the SXV supermoto, and the RXV enduro model. As if that wasn’t audacious enough, Aprilia even made each bike in two engine sizes: 450 and 550. Personally, I remember lusting after the SXV when it launched, dreams of sliding back tires happily floating through my mind. As the years wore on that lust slowly faded as I learned that the bike needed constant attention and upkeep wasn’t cheap. Still, I’d love to flog one around for a day… and then give it back to someone else. Here, let’s jump back in time and let then Senior Editor and current MO contributor Gabe Ets-Hokin, and MO’s beloved former staff photog, Alfonse Palaima, tell you how both bikes perform. Of course, there are tons more pics. Visit the photo gallery to see them.  

I didn’t pay to watch Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice because I’m failing to see the struggle. College Humor best surmises my disposition of the movie. Besides, why go the make-believe DC Comics route when we have a real-world shield and spear paradox between two super-powered nemeses right here before us: Aprilia’s Tuono V4 1100 Factory and KTM’s 1290 Super Duke R.

Of the world’s finest naked sportbikes, the KTM Super Duke R and Aprila Tuono 1100 Factory stand above the rest of the streetfighters on offer from major manufacturers. This might be an overly bold statement had we not already published four comprehensive shootouts and almost 45 minutes of video in this category during the last two years.

On Monday we brought you a flying lap of Auto Club Speedway aboard the 2016 Kawasaki ZX-10R, the runner-up in our two-way fight between it and the Aprilia RSV4 RR (which you can read about here). We praised the Kawasaki’s handling prowess and were really impressed with its updated electronics. However, we still gave the overall win in the comparison test to the Aprilia by the sheer fact it’s so easy to ride quickly. The V-4 engine’s wonderful, distinctive growl down low, combined with its pissed off bark up top encourages its rider to want to twist that throttle every chance they get. Luckily for us, that engine also produces abundant, usable torque throughout its rev range – a feature that helped it win our comparo.

Look around the liter-class sportbike landscape. The field is littered with some of the most technologically advanced and blindingly fast motorcycles the world has ever seen. Trickle-down technology from the world of MotoGP and World Superbike is making its way to production motorcycles faster than ever before, and it’s hard to deny the sportbike landscape is all the better for it.