. The Rocket III line up has altered to accommodate this change by getting rid of the standard Rocket III and the Cruiser variants, leaving this bike - the Roadster - and the Tourer as the only choices available.The first thought provoking moment rears its head

and ride it the moment you fire it up. It doesn’t tolerate being ridden from cold. Sat on the bike, you immediately feel the reach to the bars, low and long, the clutch bites when the lever is nearly fully out, which is off-putting at first, especially when

's bearable. Above 100mph - for any sustained distance - and you'll soon find it harder to do your shirt's top button up.For the first half of the road ride I kept the traction control on and worked hard to get it to kick in but it never did. So for the second

in recent years they have been continually conspiring together to shoot wide when it comes to creating a decent streetbike.Take the Kawasaki Z1000 for example. The first model looked stunning, but the engine was gutless. Then there was the ill-fated first

for engine reliability and performance.Rain pain in SpainSo, here we are in not-so-sunny Southern Spain for the European launch of the VFR1200F. Honda has planned a 200-mile route for us to test the new machine: 60 miles of motorway, around 80 miles of fast A-roads

as Katie Price’s love life. Smatterings of sun, punctuated with dreary drizzle, meant the first stint on the new FA was going to be ‘interesting’ on Spain’s notoriously slippery roads.Wandering out into the hotel car park, I catch a glimpse of the bike at a

-end is clean you get the sensation when riding it that everything is loaded in the middle to upper reaches of the power curve. This is fine in the leggy top gear (7% taller) when road conditions allow 90-plus riding, but below this you find yourself shifting

.Fumbling for the ignition (it's on the left-hand side of the engine), I pulled out onto Dublin Boulevard heading towards the Interstate for the Hammer's first real test. Admittedly not a particularly fair test as cruisers aren't designed for high-speed motorway work, but a

% average annual growth in sales. The new 950SM takes the number of road legal Supermoto models into double figures, while the Japanese have been particularly slow to catch on and are only now beginning to join the fray with their first examples

When I first heard that Neil Hodgson was off to the States to take on Duhamel, Bostrom and co in the AMA Superbike series I never doubted he had the talent and commitment to succeed.However, one concern I did have was that the machinery available