Blog Posts by: Aaron Frank  

Photography by Horst Roesler and Frank Sander Unlike American custom bike builders who hem pretty closely to air-cooled V-twins as the basis of their custom builds, on the international scene it's anything goes—usually the stranger, the better. There's no finer example of this than the annual World Championship of Custom Bike Building, ...    Read more

Our near-800-mile road trip from Kansas City to Milwaukee to kick off Harley-Davidson's 110th anniversary ended with a quick and cold, 75-mile blast from Woodstock, Illinois, to the Harley-Davidson Museum in downtown Milwaukee. We didn't leave Woodstock without first stopping to check out the picturesque town square, ...    Read more

I fell a few feet further down the Harley-Davidson rabbit hole today when I did something I've never done before—I bought my first Harley-Davidson dealer t-shirt. When the Best Western/HD110 tour made an early morning supply stop at Ted's Harley-Davidson in Alton, IL, and I saw even Harley-Davidson employees—who I ...    Read more

If Ducati's mechanical DNA makes its motorcycles inherently suited for carving up chicanes at Italian race circuits like Monza or Mugello, and BMW's big-bore touring bikes seem like they were born for the autobahn, the Midwestern United States is where a Harley-Davidson motorcycle comes into its own. It ...    Read more

Like so many of us who were raised on sportbikes, I began life as an avowed Harley-hater. Insert your favorite Harley-Davidson stereotype here—too loud, too large, too leaky, too well-liked by people who are too old, too obese, too into leather chaps or otherwise too unlike yourself—I believed some variation ...    Read more

The movie The Place Beyond the Pines, in limited theaters on March 29th and wide-release by mid-April, might star two of the most swoon-worthy stars working in Hollywood today—Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper—but motorcyclists will be more interested in the supporting role played by various Honda CRF-series motocross bikes. Gosling's ...    Read more

There are so many things about Japanese motorcycle culture I will never understand. One of Japan’s most popular apparel brands is named “Yellow Corn.” You can buy any Arai full-face helmet with Hello Kitty graphics. Parking-lot gymkhana is more popular than track days; as for racing, something called “grass-tracking” rules. ...    Read more

Thunder Stroke Indian Engine | First Look When Polaris purchased Indian two years ago, company leaders knew they faced an uphill battle. Indian might have been America’s first motorcycle manufacturer, predating Harley-Davidson by two years, but the once-proud name was tarnished by decades of bad product and worse business practices. ...    Read more

I’ll admit I had no idea who Bob Hansen was when we were first introduced in the Daytona paddock at the AHRMA vintage racing national in March 2001. I was there primarily to race Battle of the Twins on my Honda Hawk GT and, secondarily, to introduce myself to then-Motorcyclist ...    Read more

There’s a small, circular sticker on the gas tank of my 1972 Moto Guzzi V7 Sport, right in the center where I can always see it, that reads: “NOT ART.” I ordered it out of the Aerostich catalog many, many years ago. At the time, it was an adhesive-backed response ...    Read more

“Moto Guzzi isn’t about getting there the fastest,” explains Melissa MacCaull, Vice President of Piaggio Group Americas, the U.S. distributor of Moto Guzzi motorcycles. “It’s about enjoying the ride, and getting back to what true motorcycling is really about. Moto Guzzi is approachable, it’s stylish, and it’s accessible to anyone. ...    Read more

I am lucky enough to have a few custom-made racing suits, and though each fits better then any off-the-rack piece I’ve worn, none is exactly perfect. The forearms of my one-off Alpinestars suit are an inch too long, binding against my hands in tight corners, while the forearms on my ...    Read more

Which is the top sport-tourer of 2013? Will the newly refreshed Yamaha FJR1300A and new-from-the-ground-up Triumph Trophy unseat our perennial favorite sporty mile-eater, the Kawasaki Concours 14? And what about BMW’s stupendous, six-cylinder K1600GT? Our readers want answers, dammit—and we do, too! That’s why the day after the first Triumph Trophy ...    Read more

Electric motorcycles are "cleaner" than gas bikes, we're told. Safer, lower maintenance, and more accessible for novice riders, too. That's all well and good-noble, even. But what about those of us who only care about going fast? Not only are electric racebikes much slower than gas-fired counterparts, they also weigh ...    Read more

Yamaha didn’t release any notable new models at the 2012 Intermot Motorcycle Fair, but the company did create lots of buzz—and plenty of questions—with its crossplane triple engine concept. Yamaha shared zero information about the concept beyond some vague mumbo-jumbo about the Japanese philosophy of Jinki Kanno (“…a sense of ...    Read more

Harley-Davidson motorcycles have been ridden to every corner of the earth, but none has ever made a journey as remarkable as Ikuo Yokoyama’s 2004 Softail Night Train. Yokoyama had his Harley parked in a storage container outside his home in Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture when the devastating, 8.9-magnitude Tohoku earthquake struck ...    Read more

KTM’s 990 Adventure was always the most off-road capable of all big-bore adventure tourers, with its 21-inch front wheel, rally-bred chassis, and peaky, 990cc V-twin engine. But while Dakar DNA made the original Adventure at home off road, that competence came at the expense of some on-road performance—and the reality ...    Read more

The quarter-liter displacement category is getting downright crowded lately, with multiple new models from Honda and Kawasaki creating excitement in American showrooms and streets. Now Suzuki is jumping into the 250cc fray with the all-new GW250 standard, which will be offered for sale stateside as a 2013 model. Featuring modern ...    Read more

Most storylines regarding Suzuki’s Hayabusa revolve around its awesome acceleration, but for model year 2013, the big news is an upgrade to better brakes. Big speed demands big brakes, of course, and stopping power was one area in particular where last year’s Hayabusa came up short. In fact, in ...    Read more

Coming hot on the heels of news that Ducati will reenter the World Superbike Championship in 2013 with an all-new, factory-supported racing effort run by Belgium’s Team Alstare, this is our first look at the bike that Alstare racers Carlos Checa and Ayrton Badovini will ride. The 1199 Panigale R, ...    Read more

With so many convenient ways to communicate with Motorcyclist staff—via our public email account (mcmail@sorc.com), our Facebook site, the comment sections on our Web site, our Web forum, Twitter, Instagram, and more—I’m surprised that some fans still write to us the old-fashioned way, with pen and ink. Some write this ...    Read more

You might be surprised to learn—especially if you notice the stream of readers' corrections that appear almost monthly in "MC Mail"—that we actually do a lot of research in the process of writing articles around here. Especially lately, as we prepared so much historical content for our yearlong MC100 retrospective, ...    Read more

My total off-road riding experience is roughly equivalent to the tiny trace of dirt you could scrape from between the lugs of my barely worn AXO motocross boots. I didn't learn to ride on a Z50 in my parent's big back yard. I didn't spend adolescent weekends leaping tabletop jumps, ...    Read more

I've got a real on-again, off-again relationship with my 1972 Moto Guzzi V7 Sport. The "on" periods—when it's working properly—are brief and torrid. This is undeniably one of the most charismatic motorcycles ever made. The "off" periods—when it's broke-down and waiting for me to save enough time and/or money ...    Read more

BMW Motorrad has just announced pricing for its new HP4 superbike, the first production sportbike to be equipped with Dynamic Damping Control semi-active suspension. Base MSRP for the single-seat HP4 will be just $19,990, including DDC, Dynamic Traction Control, Race ABS, forged aluminum wheels, titanium Akrapovic exhaust, and more. A ...    Read more