It might look something like a Beemer R1200GS Adventure - but it’s much nastier. Flying Dutchman Nico Bakker saw a gap in the market at the top end of the adventure tourer segment - BMW’s massive Adventure is absolutely decked-out for touring, but probably sees far more road use than off-road in the hands of most owners. So why limit that bike to 100 horsepower?
The Bakker Grizzly All-Round matches the BMW’s adventure credentials, with a comfy all-day riding position, sturdy braced frame, bash plates and massive armoured luggage - but it’s built around a GSX-R1000 engine that’s around 80 horsepower up on the Beemer’s.
Built in Holland and to the buyer’s specifications, the Grizzly can be ordered with your choice of most modern 4-cylinder superbike engines, although it’s been developed around the GSX-R. The frame, single-sided swinger, tank and fairing are custom built by Bakker, and other parts are brought in from Ducati, Marzocchi, BMW, HK and Akraprovic, among others.
It’s only geared for 260km/h, which is about as fast as you’d want to be going on an unfaired bike anyway - but this drastically lowered gearing should make the All-Round an absolute monster in the lower gears. At 190kg including the hard luggage, it’s certainly not a heavy bike, so if you can keep the front down and the rear from lighting up, there’s a good chance one of these would even beat a superbike at the lights. Bakker calls it a “wolf in disguise” and looking at those numbers, it’s very hard to argue. Bravo!
Check out the Bakker website to see more of Nico’s work, including the very smooth Bakker Grizzly streetfighter this bike has been developed from.
Peter Jackson, the New Zealand-born director famous for his stunning Lord of the Rings trilogy, made his first movie on a shoestring budget. Starring his mates, and featuring a broad array of home-made special effects, props and pyrotechnics, Bad Taste still stands up as a testament to what an ingenious all-rounder can achieve through perseverance.
The same Kiwi can-do spirit underpins one of the great underdog stories in motorcycle racing history. John Britten’s dyslexia made school a struggle for him, but he emerged at the other end as an amazingly talented mechanical engineer. After building his own house (right down to casting his own taps and fittings), Britten embarked on the work that was to be his legacy: the Britten v1000 racebike.
The project started out as an attempt to make custom bodywork for his bevel-drive Ducati racebike - but as would become a pattern, Britten found that the Ducati engine and frame weren’t up to his standards. Eventually he decided to design a bike to be effective from the ground up.
Weight saving being a crucial consideration, Britten used every opportunity to make components serve double duties; there was no frame to speak of, the swingarm bolted to the rear of the engine and the odd but effective girder-style front-end to the front of it. Everything that could be spun from carbon fibre was, and the engine was designed, cast and heat-treated in the garage using water from Britten’s swimming pool for cooling.
Free from legacy design constraints, Britten was able to conceive the whole project in a unified manner and eliminate compromises inherent in the designs of the major manufacturers. The bike’s racing career had a couple of disastrous false starts - one at Daytona’s Battle of the Twins, where the bike retired from the lead due to a faulty regulator. It was a Ducati part, one of the few bits of the bike Britten didn’t design and build himself.
But once the V1000 got a roll on, it proved extremely difficult to beat, taking out the International BEARS World Championship in 1995 against the big-budget international factories, stunning the world with its sped and agility. A string of successes was to follow, earning the bike a reputation as the fastest four-stroke motorcycle in the world.
The achievement of one man - a hobbyist, no less, taking on the major manufacturers and consistently beating them - was as unthinkable in the 1990s as it would be today. Who knows what Britten might have been able to achieve had his life not been cut short by skin cancer in 1995. The bike continued racing for several years, but the Britten Motorcycle Company eventually ran out of steam without its most valuable asset.
Only 12 Britten racebikes were ever built - which is what makes these photos so special. They were taken last weekend in Christchurch, New Zealand by my good friend Roger Lawrence. The 12 Britten bikes in existence have been highly sought after by collectors, as befits the incredible story behind them, their racing success and the ingenuity of their design. One was even displayed in the Guggenheim Museum’s “Art of the Motorcycle” exhibition. The others are spread out all across the globe - so to assemble 5 of them at one race meeting definately rates as a significant and historic moment.
These photos are from the Christchurch Sounds of Thunder race meeting, where one of the bikes was taken out for several parade laps before an adoring crowd who were well aware of the machine’s significance. They may never race again, but Britten’s masterworks serve not only to remind us of the great leaps the major manufacturers are yet to take in motorcycle design, but of what is possible given a brilliant mind and determined persistence.
This video shows the amazing backyard construction of the bike, as well as some great race footage and interviews that give a fantastic insight into the humble genius of its creator:
And this is from the BBC’s top 20 greatest motorcycles of all time - where the V1000 is ranked at #6:
Swiss company Peraves first revealed its MonoTracer at last year’s Geneva Motor Show but back then the enclosed bike was still in the early stages of development and it hadn’t even undergone official testing. For this year’s Geneva Motor Show, Peraves is back and this time ‘round officials have some exciting numbers to boast about.
The final production version of the MonoTracer will now sport a 96kW four-cylinder petrol engine capable or revving to 8,750rpm. Peak torque of 117Nm arrives at just over 6,000rpm and at full tilt the MonoTracer will accelerate to 100km/h from rest in just 4.8 seconds and reach a top speed of 250km/h. Mileage comes in at 65mpg (3.6L/100km) and at this level the MonoTracer emits just 85g of carbon per km.
Key to the MonoTracer’s design is its ‘knee’ (a retracted stabilizer tire), which skims the road and allows the vehicle to lean up to 52 degrees around corners. Peraves is now planning to expand its factory and hopes to build up to 100 units of the MonoTracer per year with pricing to start at €52,000.
MV has beefed up its top-of-the-range sports and naked bikes for 2008 with a new Brutale 1078 that features a detuned version of the F4 312 engine, and an RR version of the 312 that leaves us wondering exactly where the 312 was deemed lacking.
The new 1078cc Brutale is more brutal than ever, slamming out 154hp, a figure that eclipses pretty much every other performance naked on the market, if you leave aside the bargy B-King and the “nanna’s express” shaft driven K1200R Beemer. For a compact and short sports naked, it’s certainly massively powerful. It can probably be expected to be as harsh and unforgiving a ride as the older 910 was, but with an extra excess of torque and midrange power. A slipper clutch has been added to tame it on downshifts and corner entry, and there’s been some tiny improvements to the Marzocchi/Sachs suspension package.
This year’s MV sports peformance flagship is the F4 312 RR, built on the foundation of the ludicrously excessive 312. The old bike made 190hp, had an electronically limited top speed of 312kmh, and was fitted out with componentry worthy of its performance. Still, in the Italian motorcycle world where development cycles are a lot slower than the 2-year model cycles we expect from Japanese companies, MV had to find ways to make an up-spec version to keep its line fresh.
The company has done so by including a traditional slipper clutch to accompany the 312’s existing EBS engine brake management system. Between the two systems the 312 RR promises to offer strong engine braking off the throttle, but without rear wheel lock-up. The RR has revised and closer gear ratios for a better track experience, a very slightly tweaked suspension setup, and the Brembo monobloc brake calipers are now basically the exact units run in superbike racing, with a couple of extra dust seals thrown in to make them practical on a roadbike.
Both bikes keep their iconic trestle frames, steering geometry and single-sided swingarms, and both come in a fairly standard range of MV colour schemes (red/silver, black, white) plus a cheeky blue for the 312 RR.
