The pneumatic tyre was invented by John Boyd Dunlop in 1888 for use on push-bikes. Boyd also invented the word “pneumatic”.
Slick tyres offer more grip in the wet than treaded tyres up to the point at which they aquaplane. Modern sports bike tyres don’t contain any natural rubber.
Front tyres disperse water at three times the rate of rear tyres.
When cornering, 75 per cent of a bikes grip comes from the front tyre.
The GS in GSX-R denotes four cylinders with overhead valves.
The X means four valves per cylinder and the R is for race replica.
Vespa means wasp. Cucciolo (the name of the first Ducati) means puppy.
Hayabusa is the name of a Japanese falcon that preys on blackbirds (you gotta laugh!)It was also the name of a WW2 Kamikaze fighter plane.
Steve McQueen didn’t do the famous 65 ft motorcycle jump in The Great Escape. American Triumph dealer Bud Ekins did it – in one take.
The first Honda motorcycles were pushbikes with generator engines for army field telephones bolted on.
Kawasaki also makes spaceships.
Yamaha makes swimming pools and unmanned helicopters.
Ducati once made radios.
BMW is the only current major manufacturer to reject the use of telescopic forks on its big bikes. Yet BMW was the first to use and patent them, on the R12 in 1935.
Devil, Satan and Lucifer have all been names of motorcycle manufactures.
Suzuki went from GP also-rans to world champions in 1962 after works MZ rider Emst Degner defected to the firm with all the company’s technology.
Yamaha started making bikes in 1954 but didn’t produce a four-stroke motorcycle until 1970, when the firm built the XS2 650 twin.
Harley-Davidson built push-bikes between 1917 and 1923.
The Kawasaki motorcycle division was established in 1962 for no other reason than to publicise Kawasaki ’s heavy industries, which was huge but unknown to the general public.
Evel Knievel holds the world record for breaking the most number of bones and surviving. His real name is Robert Craig Knievil.
The nickname Evel is said to have been given to him by police when he was jailed alongside William (Awful) Knofel. Knievel used a double in the film Viva Knievil. During his stunt career, Knievil spent a total of three years in hospital. When Knievil came to Britain to jump 13 buses at Wembley in 1975, he refused to drive his Cadillac on the left-hand-side of the road, insisting on driving on the right.
The Fonz (aka Henry Winkler) couldn’t actually ride a motorcycle.
In the 1970s cop show CHiPs, Larry Wilcox and Erik Estrada, who played bike patrolmen Jon and Ponch, were so dissatisfied when their Kawasaki Z1000s were swapped for BMWs that they put the BMW fairings on the Kawasakis and continued to use them.
Contrary to popular opinion, the motorcycles used in Easy Rider have not both been lost or destroyed. One of them, which was wrecked during filming, has been restored by Dan Hagerty, who played Grizzly Adams in the TV show of the same name.
No one knows what became of the Triumph 6T ridden by Marlon Brando in The Wild One. its worth £500,000.
Street Hawk only ran for 13 episodes.
Although BMW claims it has been making Boxer twins continually since 1923, production stopped for a few months in 1986 when the company decided its future lay in triples and fours.
Customer outrage persuaded the Germans to restart the twin-cylinder engine production lines.
MZ invented two-stroke expansion chambers.
The current owners of Bimota-Lorenzo-Ducati is a direct descendant of the original founder of Ducati.