#Honda

All I remember was walking down the street in Long Beach, CA, minding my own business when I heard it. Was that the sound of an irate primate? Living in Long Beach for a few years now, between the cacophonous flocks of bright green parrots and unmistakable roar of Indy cars once a year, the sound didn’t concern me, that was until I felt a heavy blow to the back of my head.

Honda has teased another Neo Sports Café motorcycle on its social media channels, with many speculating it will be a new CB650R model featuring the company’s current retro-modern styling for naked bikes.

By now, hopefully you’ve already read our street installation of this two-part test. If not, STOP! Please do check it out because it outlines and dissects each and every bike in great detail, and it very well might answer a slew of questions you might have that aren’t addressed here, in the off-road portion of the shootout.

Since Sachsenring, Marc Marquez had grown weary hearing about how great the Ducati is, how great Andrea Dovizioso and Jorge Lorenzo are, how they’ve been making a chump out of him since August. Marc Marquez, despite his calm exterior, is a fiercely competitive young man. Today, with no pressure and no real incentive other than pride, he went out and beat Dovizioso in front of his home fans, assuring them that he may be many things, but one of them is not a chump.

Mid-September and it’s come down to this, for the handful of riders (other than Marc Marquez) entertaining increasingly unlikely notions of winning the 2018 title. For the remainder of the season, it’s win or bin. No more brave smiles from the second step of the podium. In the lasting words of the late Roy Orbison, “It’s Now or Never.” Unless you get stoked finishing, you know, second, or third.

Lo and behold, and thank frickin’ God, the 2019 Honda CRF450L is finally here. Every so often, a new motorcycle will come out, and it’ll shake things up and get people thinking. Perhaps it’ll make them see motorcycles in a different light, change their minds about them, or even convince them that, maybe owning a motorcycle could be awesome… Ain’t that just the craziest idea?

If you’re anything like me when it comes to riding in the dirt, you’re willing to sacrifice a little comfort and user-friendliness in favor of higher performance and better handling. This was pretty much always the case for me as I’d ride my CRF450R both at the track and on the trails, or in the desert/woods/mountains/etc. At the motocross track in its intended environment, the CRF450R is a beast; out in the sticks, the R still rules. However, it definitely gives up certain advantages and conveniences to more trail-inspired bikes like the CRF450X. Fortunately, Honda has built a do-it-all bike for riders like us who don’t want to compromise performance and handling at the track for convenience on the trail – the 2019 Honda CRF450RX.

2018 will go down in Bologna, Italy as the first year Ducati recorded MotoGP wins at both Mugello and Misano. As expected, the contest quickly devolved into another Marquez vs. Desmosedici doubleteam, #93 spending a solid part of the day cruising in third. When Jorge Lorenzo stunned the 97,000 fans by sliding out of second place on Lap 26, Marc Marquez glommed onto the second step of the podium and added another crushing 8 points to his 2018 lead. When you can win while losing, you are The Man.

The last three iterations of what used to be known as the Misano round in MotoGP have found factory Honda riders standing on the top step of the podium: Marc Marquez in 2015 and 2017 and Dani Pedrosa in 2016. The first was a rare double flag-to-flag affair, the second dry, the third wet. The conditions do not appear to matter. Can showman Valentino Rossi stiff-arm Marquez and find a way to put on a late-career memory-maker in front of his homeys? The bells of Tavullia beckon.

Honda Racing UK has created a one-off custom CB1000R for the 2018 Glemseck 101 in Leonberg, Germany, with none other than five-time 500cc GP World Champion Mick Doohan tabbed to ride it in the event’s Sprint International drag race.

On a humid and hazy southern California morning our cast of misfits began to stir to life from all stretches of the LA basin. Showers were had (by some), coffee was made and consumed, gear was donned. We seven fortunate souls set out on what would be our first true challenge of the next 72 hours, the first gauntlet that our machines would be subjected to, weekday traffic in Los Angeles with a destination of none other than Starbucks. The unofficial meeting place of adventure riders the world over, yet, for so many, the journey’s end before it ever even begins.

The entire weekend devoted to the GoPro British Grand Prix seemed to be accompanied by a sense of foreboding due to the weather. One had the sense that dry practice sessions and a wet race could lead to carnage and confusion; Exhibit A occurred near the end of FP4. In the end, the carnage and confusion was restricted mainly to the race organizers, sponsors and rider Tito Rabat. After hours and hours of hemming and hawing, the British round of the 2018 MotoGP season was scrubbed.

I should probably have broken this down into “Riders Over 50 with a History of Failed Relationships and Bad Decisions Without a Pot to Piss In,” and “Riders Over 50 With Healthy Portfolios and Dazzling Smiles”… but I didn’t. Because motorcycles are still relatively inexpensive, and because all us old guys seem to be drawn to the same ones whatever they cost. Besides, even wealthy motorcycle people mostly seem to be inherently cheap; otherwise they’d be car people, no? Consider this my personal cross-section of the bikes people like me covet most, and/or actually would (theoretically in my case) own.

You know things are rough in the upper tranches of MotoGP when riders are reduced to praying for inclement weather as a means of slowing down Honda’s putative 2018 world champion Marc Marquez. Iconic Silverstone is the first of a quartet of races that should bring Marquez’ magic number into view. While the weather figures to be a factor, it may not be enough to slow down the Catalan savant.

Okay so maybe I have grown a little bit jaded, ogling then hopping on all these exciting new models year after year, only to stumble across so many of them parked in the gutter a few years later with bald tires and faded paint. Like a grizzled combat veteran, you learn not to make new friends, to control your expectations. Lots of us were knocked for a loop by the Kawasaki Z900RS last year, and I was swept up in the rabble. Later, I felt the bike was a little too derivative of Kawasaki’s earlier work, too obviously grasping at middle-aged heartstrings. Ten minutes later the cool kids were slobbering all over the Vitpilen. I didn’t quite feel it, personally, and riding the bike a while ago didn’t convert me. Next.