#rr

Aprilia sprang its latest 201-horsepower superbike on the crowd in Cologne. While the RR might look pretty much the same on the outside, it’s what’s inside that counts – and the main addition is the fourth generation APRC electronics that keeps it all in check: Aprilia Performance Ride Control. Now there’s cornering ABS, a downshift-enabled quickshifter, and a host of other refinements including optional V4-MP which lets you access and download via smartphone corner-by-corner APRC calibration. It also manages incoming and outgoing phone calls. You could conceivably order a pizza on the last lap, should you find yourself coming over all peckish.

It takes a really special motorbike to win our MOTY award, and the Super Duke GT comes from premium stock, as it’s based on the winner of our 2014 Motorcycle of the Year, the 1290 Super Duke R. The uncanny beauty of the GT is that it retains the wonderful virtues of the R and expands the platform with a plethora of comfort and convenience updates that enhance the bike’s appeal without appreciably hindering its performance capabilities.

For those who’ve lapped up every word, expression, and metaphor of the performance novel that was our 2017 Superbike Track Shootout and Superbike Street Shootout, the heir apparent is as obvious as the bike coming in last place. For those still wallowing in anticipation, unable to decipher our MOrse code, you can take a breath because, without further ado, we give you…

A few days riding seven of the most powerful sportbikes available on public roadways without incurring a single speeding ticket is next to miraculous. Johnny Law, wildlife, tourists, and sharing hotel rooms with one another are only a few of the occupational hazards we navigated when conducting our 2017 Superbike Street Shootout. The street-centric comparison may be representative of the actual lives most of these motorcycles will lead in the real world, but for us it’s a necessary precursor to where we prefer to be and where these bikes should actually be ridden: the racetrack.

Twenty fifteen was a big year for sportbikes, with the new Yamaha R1 and a heavily revised BMW S1000RR and Aprilia RSV4 RF making their debuts – the two European weapons motoring their way to the Best Sportbike and runner-up awards, respectively, in last year’s Sportbike MOBOs. With the proverbial load being blown that year, there wasn’t much excitement in store for 2016, save for the new, heavily revised Kawasaki ZX-10R. The Green Machine is a good literbike, no doubt, but it still wasn’t a match for the year-old Aprilia RR (the “base” model RSV4) when we put the two $17,000 machines against each other.

One of our favorite naked sportbikes is getting a larger engine and more power as Piaggio pulled the wraps off the new 2015 Aprilia Tuono V4 1100. Piaggio will actually produce two versions, the standard Tuono V4 1100 RR and the upgraded Tuono V4 1100 Factory.