2009 Yamaha 950 V-star Tourer on 2040-motos

Moto blog

2013 Suzuka 8 Hours Endurance World Championship Results

The Musashi HARC-Pro Honda team of Leon Haslam, Michael van der Mark and Takumi Takahashi captured the 2013 Suzuka 8 Hours race. The Musashi team was joined on the podium by the Yoshimura Suzuki team of Takuya Tsuda, Nobuatsu Aoki and Josh Brookes and the Kagayama Suzuki team of Yukio Kagayama, Noriyuki Haga and Kevin Schwantz. The Musashi team completed 214 laps to win the endurance race.

Teaser: 2012 Japanese Literbike Shootout – Video

The last time we assembled the superbike offerings from the Big Four Japanese manufacturers to determine the alpha male model was 2009. The CBR won that confrontation, but a lot’s changed since then. For 2012 Honda revamped the CBR1000RR, Yamaha added traction control to the R1, the GSX-R1000 lost a muffler and last year Kawasaki introduced an all-new ZX-10R.

Simon and Leo

If you are a track day regular this year, you may well have bumped into former racer and friendly Kiwi, Simon Crafar. I first met him in Malaysia in 1990 when he was riding for a Yamaha dealer team, sweating his way round circuits like Shah Alam and Johor Bahru but with a long term plan to make it onto the World scene. And he didn’t take long as after riding for Honda in the UK in 1992 he moved to WSB in 1994 and enjoyed success with both the Honda and Kawasaki factory teams.