Features

  Perhaps you have to go further back to the charismatic ‘naked’ US Championship superbikes of Eddie Lawson, David Aldana and Wayne Rainey in the late 1970s and early Eighties or the World Championship winning ‘tandem twins’ of Kork Ballington, Anton Mang and Greg Hansford in that same era. Or perhaps even further back to…

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The chance to ride the one and only factory Harley-Davidson 500GP racer ever built came on a sunny summer’s day at Pirelli’s Vizzola test track, just half an hour from the lakeside Schiranna factory near Varese where it was built during the winter of 1974-75. It has lived all its life near there, too –…

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In 1971 he scored three GP wins on the ex-Stuart Graham 125 Suzuki at Spa, Belgium; Anderstorp, Sweden and  Imatra, Finland. He’d even won the 50cc GP in Brno, Czechoslovakia, as guest rider for the Van Veen Kreidler team, but his results during the following years on the continent were a faint shadow of that…

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  Back in 1960, the biggest motorcycle model that Ducati made was just 200cc, so most people would have considered anyone talking of turning that little bike into a 350 racer to be certifiably insane. But successful California racer, Frank Scurria, saw potential where others thought none existed and began a project that eventually saw…

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Mick Doohan and the Honda NSR500 formed the most formidable and successful partnership of the 500cc era of Grand Prix racing that ran from 1949 until 2001. The NSR scored a total of 133 GP wins between its introduction in 1984 and Valentino Rossi’s last win on the bike in Rio in 2001, after which the four-stroke…

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  The Highboy-framed BSA-3 which Mike Hailwood raced in the 1970 Daytona 200 is in the Barber Museum in Alabama, but the fate of his 1971 Lowboy bike is less certain. Taking the frame of a bike as its genesis, there’s a good case for identifying the bike pictured here as being that machine. It…

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My participation in Europe for the works Gilera team was a boy’s dream come true. Back in 1957, when I was 17, I accompanied my father, Salvador, who was racing a 500cc Gilera Piuma in the Argentinian championship races. At the end of the season, the Buenos Aires circuit played host to the Argentinian GP,…

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Whenever Ginger Molloy and his mechanic Gary Williams travelled on the Continent they either slept under the stars, between the bikes inside the van, or even on top of the bikes using a thin foam squab laid over them. Sleeping arrangements improved ten-fold however when Ginger’s wife Claire joined the overseas adventures, as they also…

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There’s an understandable beam of pride that comes from Tim Davies and Nathan Colombi when either of the two men talk about the Suzuki GB/Team Classic Suzuki Katana race bike – and it could be because that, despite what you might think when you look at this ‘factory’ race bike, this has been something of…

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Yamaha’s RD56 factory racer which took Phil Read to the 1964 250cc World title really did use a disc-valve motor which profited from MZ technology – purloined by Suzuki from the DDR’s MZ, by enabling its rider-engineer colleague Ernst Degner to defect to the West in 1961 – that tech was widely shared and with…

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