Honda put the Nighthawk name on motorcycles for the better part of two decades, but we are only going to talk about one year.... 1983. It's when the badge stopped being a paint job and started meaning something, the year Honda took a mid-size standard nobody was excited about and rebuilt it from the crank up. Before 1983, it was just a facelift The Nighthawk name first showed up in 1982, stitched onto the existing CB650: new tank, new side covers, the round headlight that wou

Who is Tyler Golletti? A Maine rider who takes a 1921 Harley J across the country, four thousand miles in sixteen days, on three gears and an oil system that dumps on the ground behind him. The first time he tried it he made two days out of sixteen and went home feeling like a fraud. He now has that motorcycle tattooed on his hand…. There is a version of this story where Tyler quits, and he would have earned it. In 2023 he lined up for the Motorcycle Cannonball, Virginia to

KTM does not really build a dual sport. It builds an enduro race bike, and then for the American market it gives it the legal minimum … a headlight a horn a pair of mirrors a plate bracket Everything underneath is still a race bike, which is either exactly what you want or a very expensive misunderstanding. The Numbers... 510.9cc SOHC liquid-cooled single Dirt Rider put a 2023 at 40.5 hp and 28.6 lb-ft on the dyno Six-speed WP Xplor 48mm fork with 11.8 inches of travel Brembo

Who is Tom Gosselin? Twenty years in the bicycle industry before he ever threw a leg over a motorcycle. A hardtail Sportster built in thirty days on fifteen hundred dollars, four and a half acres of Maine woods, astrophysics nerd because of Indian Larry, and a job with the BMW MOA. Tom lives in the balance between BMW and custom motorcycles, and the reason we started talking at all was the show he is putting on with the BMW MOA at Barber, which runs inside BMW Motorrad Days.

Who is Samantha? Legally blind since birth, and the passenger who throws herself across a sidecar platform at ninety miles an hour. She races with her husband Eric and uses his body movement as her guide to the track. Samantha is legally blind, born with vertical nystagmus - a fault in the nerve that connects the eye to the brain that keeps her eyes in constant motion. As a child she had to be taught how to see; without vision teachers, she says, her eyes would have atrophied

Mini bikes are the norm at any bike show, in fact they often become part of the show. Having ridden a Benelli at Vintage Days I can tell you I definitely need one now.