Mike Vienne is a man obsessed by weight. His specialty is turning blunt knives into razor-sharp scalpels: or rather, improving sportbikes by stripping off everything that slows them down. He runs L.A.-based Championship Cycles, which “began from the idea that less is more. Because more is heavy, and heavy is slow.”
Read more »
You could call it a mongrel, or a parts bin special—but we reckon this unusual Ducati is one of the cleverest and most original builds we’ve seen for a long time. It uses parts from several very different Ducatis, and comes from an Englishman called Chris Dedman. He lives in the ancient market town of…
Read more »
We don’t see many customs from Russia. But Moscow-based Birdie Customs and their founder Ilya are doing their best to remedy that, with a slow but steady stream of classy performance customs. Birdie’s Ducati 900 SS knocked us out a year ago, and they’ve just returned with an even faster 900 SS, built in a…
Read more »
In the automobile world, if you need a millimeter-perfect restoration or subtle upgrades to the icon in your garage, you go to guys like Classic Motor Cars, Zweimüller or François Sicard. In the Ducati world, if you live in Europe and know your stuff, the name Harné Heuvelman is likely to be on your list.…
Read more »Ducati’s back catalog is littered with hits and misses. Consider the Ducati 900 SuperSport: the early 1990s version is a classic beauty;…
Read more »Jay LaRossa is one of those guys who was probably born with copper grease under his fingernails. His parents ran motorcycle dealerships,…
Read more »The Ducati 900 SS is one of the great bargains in the motorcycling world. And not because it’s a bad bike. On…
Read more »There are purists who baulk at the thought of changing even one bolt on a classic motorcycle—and then there’s folks like us.…
Read more »Customizing a motorcycle is often a game of knowing what to change, and what to leave alone. Some bikes have attributes that…
Read more »With the new-wave custom scene continually evolving and diversifying, it’s becoming progressively more difficult to classify custom motorcycles. Even the mere mention…
Read more »When a Ducati 900SS rolls into a workshop for a big-budget overhaul, it usually leaves a few weeks later looking just like…
Read more »I’m a big fan of keeping it simple when it comes to color schemes. Orange for a Laverda, black for a Vincent,…
Read more »
