Roadster Motorcycles

’King’ Kenny Roberts is a massively important figure in motorcycle racing: two Grand National championships, 32 wins, three 500cc World Championships and 24 wins. No matter what he rode, he beat all-comers.

Having separated the electric Livewire brand from the parent Harley Davidson brand, the company has now revealed its future plans.

Austrian designed and Chinese-built retro roadster is the spitting image of the Triumph Bonneville in more ways than just looks.

Motorcycles with back-stories are highly sought after and the Triumph that the Fonz rode in TV series Happy Days is no exception. Recently sold at auction, it fetched nearly twice is pre-auction estimate.

Part of Yamaha’s “Faster Sons” lineup, the XSR700 is based largely on the proven MT-07 platform. It is a reinterpretation of a vintage design for a modern-retro look, clearly meant to draw in the hipster/Millennial crowd, as well as those with an appreciation for classic design elements. It’s not all about looks, though, the mill churns out a claimed 73.8 horsepower and 50.2 pound-feet of torque to push the 410-pound wet weight, so there’s no shortage of thrills to be had on Yamaha’s mid-size roadster.

Ahead of its public unveiling at the Motorcycle Live Show in England, the revived BSA brand shows off the brand new 650 Gold Star

At the dawn of the modern era of Japanese motorcycles, the four-cylinder inline engine was king, but that didn’t stop Suzuki going off at a tangent with a rotary-engined bike.

After the success of the retro Z900RS, Kawasaki introduced the Z650RS. Now, is the Japanese manufacturer about to launch a Z400RS?

The imminent demise of the air-cooled CB1100 roadster, Honda is left with a retro bike-sized hole in its line up, the only Japanese manufacturer to be so empty. New patent drawings show a replacement might not be that far away.

The second of six digital launches sees the Bologna manufacturer launch two new Scrambler models, the Tribute PRO and the Urban Motard, with 1100cc and 800cc engines respectively.

Suzuki has been playing around with a parallel twin replacement for its ageing 650cc v-twin for some years now with nothing ever reaching production. New patent applications show that the concept isn’t dead yet.

Harley Davidson is set to renew its attack on the lucrative Asian market through its partnership with Hero MotorCorp, the Indian motorcycle manufacturing giant. The first model will be a retro-style mid-capacity roadster.

Introduced in 2010 in Japan and Australia and then to the rest of the world in 2014, the CB1100 modern classic has received few upgrades in its life and now it appears to be on its last legs in the face of ever more stringent emissions regulations.

Indian expands its street-friendly Flat Track Racer line for 2022 with the addition of the FTR S model that brings top-shelf ride-quality/safety equipment and advanced electronics to the table. Power comes from the same mill that drives the rest of the platform with 120 horsepower on tap to get things moving right along.

The BMW G310R is a much better bike than its Indian origins suggest. It is very definitely a BMW, even though it plays in a segment where BMW have not played in before. For 2021, it has been updated, although you have to look closely to see the updates. It’s now Euro5 compliant, without losing any power or torque and there are detail differences here and there. BMW has chosen to leave pretty much well alone to keep the cost down while not detracting from the riding pleasure.

Teaser videos about new models are nothing new. In the past few weeks, we’ve had multiple videos from Husqvarna and two from Triumph, all of which have at least shown the motorcycle that is being teased, albeit in varying levels of visibility. This latest attempt from Kawasaki is pretty dire and tells us pretty much nothing.

With the Z900RS doing great business for Kawasaki, it would make sense to take the parallel twin engine from the Z650 and put it into a retro-styled model to cash in on the booming modern classic segment.