Shout out to the guys over at Bike Exif for these brilliant renders from Russian designer Mikhail Smolyanov.

Ranging from Phillip K Dick stype futurism to the Neo-Retro avaiation-automotive crossover, there’s something charcateristically russian about the designs.

We reckon Smolyanov must have been influenced by the aesthetics of Sputnik and the early Russian manned space programme.

For more great stuff from the Eastern margins get yourself to

Solifuge Design.

Photos by Milagro

A few years ago most dual-purpose bikes were boring devices: too slow to be fun on the road, and too crude and heavy to be much good off it. BMW changed all that with the hugely popular R1200GS, as ridden round the world by Ewan McGregor. But even the GS can’t match the amazing blend of style, speed and versatility that is the Ducati Multistrada 1200S.

Ducati tried to crack the dual-purpose market a few years ago with its original Multistrada, which added some practicality to the Italian factory’s traditional recipe of red-blooded V-twin engine and light, sporty chassis. That Multi was a handy bike but it looked a bit gawky and its 992cc aircooled engine wasn’t particularly powerful.

Not so the completely redesigned Multistrada 1200, which is a much more serious piece of kit. To create this outrageous device Ducati sharpening the styling, bolted in a thunderous, 150bhp liquid-cooled V-twin motor developed from that of the super-sports 1198, and added the most sophisticated electronics package motorcycling has seen.

By pressing a button on the handlebar, the Multi’s rider can toggle between Sport, Touring, Urban and Enduro modes. This instantly changes the bike’s power delivery and level of wheelspin-reducing traction control. On the more expensive Multistrada S (there’s also a cheaper standard model) it also electronically adjusts suspension settings to suit everything from fast road riding to off-road exploration.

It might be a dual-purpose bike, but the Multistrada is a proper Ducati. Despite having wide, raised handlebars that give a comfortably upright riding position, it comes to life with a throaty V-twin bark. When you open the throttle at low speed, the Multi accelerates so hard that its front wheel comes up before you know it. This is no bike for novices but it is addictively entertaining, all the way to a top speed of over 150mph.

Fortunately the beast can be instantly tamed by a press of that button. Selecting Urban or Enduro mode smooths the power delivery, limits maximum output to 100bhp, and softens the S-model’s suspension. Like this the Ducati is responsive and easy to ride; fine for slicing through town traffic. It copes reasonably well on a dirt track, too, though its softened suspension still clonks over potholes, and its Pirelli tyres are very much road biased.

It’s in Touring or Sport mode that the Multistrada excels. Despite being 20bhp less powerful than the 1198, it blends raw power with wonderfully flexible delivery, and very light yet stable handling. It’s also a very versatile machine that has a wide and comfortable dual-seat, comprehensive instrumentation, and a 20-litre tank that’s good for well over 150 miles. That almost matches the R1200GS, and far surpasses Honda’s VFR1200F sports-tourer.

The BMW gives better wind protection and is a more rugged off-roader, but for road use the Ducati is much faster and more fun. The Multistrada S comes either as the Sport, with mudguards and other parts in carbon-fibre; or more usefully as the Touring, with heated grips, panniers and centre-stand. If you want a single motorcycle for commuting, touring, rapid road riding and even the occasional track day or gentle off-road excursion, there’s simply nothing to match it.

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1964: Boyhood dreams of Grease, rock & denim.

In my dreams I was a British Biker. I was a mod-baiting, leather wearing fetishist of all things American. That was the look anyway. But it was only English Iron that would do for my ride. Clip on bars. Pegs way back. Buffed steel tank. In my mind I nicked a featherbed frame from a greaser mate and bolted the Bonneville engine and I was away. Brilliant. The new roads of boom time Britain had me burning from caff-to-caff, round the gyratory and back again. Ton up to the bass string notes of Eddie Cochrane. That was the life in Levis and leather. Transatlantic exchange meant everything to me. In my imagination at least.

1975: Fizzy — first flights of Freedom

Then I came to consciousness. Reality check. Kenny Roberts was the hero. Forget Sheene. You could squeeze so much power and speed and noise out of the Yamaha FSIE’s 50 ccs. So it seemed to me anyway. I had a Roberts replica complete with wasp-like yellow and black paintjob. The boom time was over and there were power cuts and the three-day working week. Our estate was seething and humming and buzzing with the sound of my mates and their fizzies and the smell of two stroke and the heavy riffs of Metal. The dole money was enough to keep her going. They’re cool again now — icons of sustainability, apparently. For us, they were icons of the future.

image: thanks to Shane@ FS1E.net

1985: RDLC Powerbands and driving bans
The miner’s strike was over before it started. And we had scored our first licence. We never cared about politics, anyway. We were more interested in powerbands. And Elsie had a serious powerband. She kicked in hard and it was all you did to keep her lit and in the straight line. Elsie was all about first shunts, broken bones and first loves. If you tried to ride her like a fizzy you were doomed. And we were doomed alright. There was a certain feeling to the Elsie on the roads above the moors, and we were convinced it was all about the liquid.

1990s Kawasaki Ninja 600: knee dragging in middle age
By the mid nineties, you’d fallen out of love and back into lust with two wheels. The Ninja was the thing that did it. Elsie had proven too hard to live with, too riotous to handle. You had to get a job and get into four wheels. You first saw them on the road in Southern France. Well-off French kids in toothpaste leather scraping their knees in the borderlands up in the Pyrenees. All of a sudden everyone was riding sports bikes and I was a flash of green, with that slightly camp pink type on the rear. I left the Yam kink way behind. And the speed. It was the first time I’d travelled significantly over the Ton, a guilty secret which had inspired us all in the first place, but when you did it on the M1 you felt the breath of the grim reaper too keenly down the back of your neck.

2010: Back to the Future
I am a British biker. I am a Prius-baiting, Belstaff wearing, fetishist of all things British. Now it’s the clothing as well as the bike. I’ve paid Triumph and they’ve given me a recreation of the bike I dreamt of and I am away. The roads may be clogged, but I can bypass all that on the weekend. I get up early on a summer Sunday and I am back to those dreams of my youth. But now they are real. I avoid the Ace Café and all that retro nonsense. There’s nothing retro and ‘fashion’ about English-bred speed. All I need to do is twist my grip and I leave the last forty years behind. And it feels good.

Image: Deus Ex Machina

Words: Barney Morgan

Fresh in from the Salt Flats at Bonneville Utah comes this staggering piece of footage of the new Land Speed Record for two wheelers of 367.382 mph.

Pilot Chris Carr and the BUB Racing team took their Streamliner Seven to the new watershed this weekend. The vehicle packs 3 liters of turbocharged CCs and produces 535 HP through its purpose-built 16-valve V4 motor.

According to Asphalt and Rubber, it’s not only the heavy horsepower and the streamlined shell that has facilitated this ridiculous velocity, but also a special firing sequence that allows for extra grip on the salty Bonneville surface.

Enjoy. But don’t try this at home.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If over-the-top voicovers had an Academy Awards, this guy would have a full trophy cabinet.

And if Bikesploitation was a recognised genre, Rebel Rousers would be legend. But surprisingly, you’ve probably never seen this 1970 tale of wayward sexually depraved, murderous bikers. Probably because it is awful, in a cool kind of way.

It’s no surprise that the studio namechecked the biker film from the era that you do remember, namely Easy Rider. Fact was that Easy Rider tapped into a very American period fear/obsession with the evil eating away at society from within. And more often than not, it was bikers who encapsulated the thing that mainstream America feared.

The film may be faintly ridiculous, but for anyone interested in how bikers have been (mis) represented in the media, it’s well worth a look. And mother, don’t let your daughter watch.

[Show as slideshow]

Like many kids’ fads that turn out to have lasting resonance, they were popularised in the states, when the boom-time affluence of America enabled the generation of original postwar petrolheads to get their kids vibed on engine-propelled fun good and early.

But the classic minibike, and our personal favourite is of course, the Honda Monkeybike. There’s not a kid in the known universe who wouldn’t go mental at the prospect of finding one of these in santa’s sack.

Typically powered by engines with a displacement of between 50 amd 90 ccs, these small wheeled bundles of fun have created a world wide cult of undersized two wheeled fun. Check out the Monkey Runners for inspiration.

Images via MC Art

If you’re a lover of the classic and a have an inbred desire for things mechanical, the Honda RC 166 is a thing of true, timeless beauty.

The inline six 250 was winner of 10 out of 10 races in the 1966 World Championships series and captured the Manufacturers’ and Riders’ Championships in the 250cc class for two consecutive years, as well as the Isle of Man TT of that year.

Seen here in the Guise of Mike Hailwood’s no 7 machine, one of the things that distinguished the bike was its incredible engine note, thanks in part to its aesthetically pleasing battery of six pipes (below).

The sound is so good that, according to Hell for Leather magazine (one of our favourite bikey portals) the sound of the RC166 is now available as a ringtone!

Not sure if the fans in the Japanese TV studio in the clip below will be signing up.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A TONGUE-TIP TASTE OF CLASSIC BIKING: SAN FRANCISCO STYLE

“The thing is with modern bikes, is they’ve got no soul.” Rob, proprietor of the Ace Cafe in San Francisco’s Mission district, presides over one of the hubs of neo classicism of San Francisco’s biker community. “There’s nothing like a bit of English Iron to get the adrenalin going…” he laughs.

Rob is a twenty five year émigré from Liverpool who cherishes his accent as much as he does his hard won beer and wine license from the city of San Francisco. As he tells me this, he puts another beer down on the bar as another pod of black leather and denim-clad young bucks with sculpted features and a Friday vibe stream into the Ace.

On the walls are a series of homages to classic bike scenarios, Manx vistas, racer portraits, retro oil ads and admonitions to the young and the reckless in the shape of back-to-back loops of On Any Sunday. “ Sure I’ve ridden Jap bikes, owned tons of them. But I keep going back to British machines, as well as the odd Italian. They’ve got something more to them than loads of revs and loads of technology.”

And Rob and the crew at the Ace are just part of a huge movement toward classic European bikes here in San Francisco. But the hipster capital of the world, ubiquitously wired, post ironic and self styled capital of the American left field, is at the vanguard of a global phenomenon that has as much to do with disillusionment as it has to do with a regeneration of fashion sensibility.

Tony is a salesmen at Munroe Motors, on Valencia Street in the Mission, just round the corner from the Ace. “It’s unbelievable how popular Ducatis and Triumphs are becoming these days, “ he tells me as the slanted Californian light glints beautifully off the acreage of European steel lined up deliciously in the Munroe shopfront. “I think that it’s because people realise now that bikes are not only brilliant value and are relatively environmentally friendly, that European they are more craft-oriented and mechanically accessible than super high-tech bikes from Japan.”

But underlying this trend toward getting back to mechanical integrity is an undercurrent of romance, an aesthetic rejection of all things electronic and over-designed. “As soon as I got on a Ducati I knew I’d never go back” Crash tells me. The worryingly monikered twenty eight year old graphic designer (who is also a bike riding instructor part time), and tells me of the beauty of his Ducati Classic Sport S (above).

In a sense the return to the classic in Biking in San Francisco is a nod to the general zeitgeist. While bikers will always be petrolheads at heart, jump on a classically proportioned machine with passionate design and minimalist electronics and you’ll evoke a simpler, less guilt ridden time when getting from A-to B was not only about having as much fun as possible, but was also about hand wrought, hard won expertise. In San Francisco biking parlance, Classic means European, and European means style. In San Francisco, the classics have been well and truly cooled. And what happens in USA happens soon amongst the Eurotrash. Watch this space. And fire up that Triumph.

Australia’s image, even deep here in the heart of the 21st century isn’t really compatible with artful postmodernism. Nor is the motorbike itself particularly associated (in the UK at least) with the tendency to fetishise the object.

Our biking tradition is fundamentally stained happily and perhaps eternally with the greasy rag. Free born Brits love bikes and dig the aesthetic of two wheeled speed – but the reflection tends to begin and end with the practicalities of saddling up and riding hard.

Contrast our died-in-the-wool mentality with the way of approaching bike culture as typified by our antipodean friends at Deus bikes in Sydney.

Part design studio, bike workshop, part café (the type that serves lattes rather than fried brekkies), Deus is a self-conscious temple of all things bikey. They will sell you a classic bike and accompanying paraphernalia, and will design and build with you your very own bespoke mutant, from Café clones like the one pictured above) to Steve McQueen-ish Desert racers and back again.

The whole idea is the brainchild of a trio of Aussie creative ruffians, one of which helped create the iconoclastic, explosively successful and delightfully subversive surf/street brand Mambo.

Whatever English biker purists might think of it, these guys have tapped beautifully into an increasingly popular creed of international classic bike enthusiast who appreciates the beauty of motorcycle culture design and engineering at a whole other level.

Placing the retail Deus experience in a beautifully designed space will generally helpfully migrate your passion for the classic side of motorcycling to the realms of high culture.

Power to their leather-patched elbows. And make mine a mocaccino.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Whilst calculating the emissions totals for our ongoing roadtrip in Scotland with a Landrover Discovery, we came across a news story about the world’s first fully emissions free superbike GP, which is scheduled for the Isle of Man this summer.

Problem is with electric powered bikes is, of course, the weight of the batteries. Size and heftiness has always made it difficult to make a nimble and aesthetically pleasing machine. Things might be moving on, however.

The bike pictured is the GP entry from Imperial College, London. Sponsored by Valence technologies (the folk who make the batteries), the bike will be ridden by Chris Palmer, three-time overall race winner at the Isle of Man TT. Chris also holds the lap records for the Billown Circuit and Mountain Course for the Ultra-Lightweight TT class.

The bike weighs in at 290kg and has a peak power output of 50hp, with the ability to accelerate from 0-60mph in 4 seconds and go on to a top speed of 100mph. It has an impressive range of up to 150 miles. The electric motors have been mounted towards the rear, with the batteries occupying space previously occupied by the engine and fuel tank, meaning the bike benefits from a lower centre of gravity.

The TTXGP will be integrated into the usual bonkers TT schedule in June, and will probably be giggled at by the hairy arsed greasemonkeys of the internally combusted pursuasion.

But surely, dragging your knee round the Island with nothing but the sound of benign whirring to disturb your flow would appeal to purists of the art of fast biking. Wouldn’t it?

Click here to view the embedded video.