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Wednesday 14 February 2024

News Briefs



Marietta, Georgia based Estenson Racing has announced that young title contenders Dallas Daniels and Tom Drane are to return to spearhead the 2024 AFT Championship campaign for the Estenson Racing squad - Daniels in the Mission SuperTwins on the Yamaha MT-07 and Drane on the Yamaha YZ450F in the Parts Unlimited AFT Singles presented by KICKER. 


Montreal based Taiga Motors Corporation, Canada's leading electric powersports brand, is set to be the exclusive Personal Watercraft (PWC) supplier of the UIM E1 World Championship, the world's first and only all-electric powerboat championship. The championship will see up to ten teams and 20 mixed gender pilots racing on the water in iconic cities around the world, with the U.S. due to host a race in Season 2.  


The American Motorcyclist Association will celebrate "the great heroes of motorcycling" with its annual AMA Hall of Fame Days on 10-13 October, 2024, on the AMA campus in Pickerington, Ohio. The Class of 2024 will be formally inducted at the annual recognition ceremony on October 10. 


H-D has recalled some 1,464 2023 FLHXSE (Street Glide CVO) models for engine and engine cooling and structural component issues that could make the motorcycle difficult to control at high speeds. 


Indian Motorcycle is recalling 1,215 2023 - 2024 Chieftain, Roadmaster and Springfield motorcycles for an improperly routed crankshaft position sensor issue. 


With the cold, hard realities of life cast adrift from the European Union starting to become apparent, the United Kingdom has abandoned the new, post-Brexit UKCA (United Kingdom Conformity Assessed) mark. The scheme was intended to reduce complexity and cost for vendors selling on the UK market, allowing their products to diverge from EU standards - namely become poorer quality. But it turns out the scheme was actually increasing complexity and cost and was starting to reduce consumer choice. Brands had been starting to decide that the extra overhead of additional new UK standards, for a diminishing market, would not likely result in an acceptable ROI. Therefore, the British Conservative government, the same one that thought commercial isolation was a "good thing" in the first place, has now surrendered to the embrace of Johnny Foreigners' nasty rules and abandoned the UKCA scheme. 


Kawasaki has shown what is slated to be to be the world's first production sports bike powered by hydrogen. Tests with the Ninja H2 HySE ride-ready prototype are due to start in 2024. Created as part of the Kawasaki, Yamaha, Suzuki, Honda and Toyota 'HySE' consortium effort, it was unveiled at its "Group Vision 2030" conference in Japan in December. Based on its existing H2 model, rear panniers hold extra hydrogen canisters with the 999 cc super-charged inline-four designed to be very similar to a conventional gas engine - complete with direct injection.


The 2023 Isle of Man TT was a resounding success, though it still lags the highest record attendance seen in 2019. The IOM Government's Department for Enterprise has revealed findings of a survey (the first since 2019) that show overall visitor numbers for the period down by an estimated -6.3% on the 2019 attendance at 43,272. At 46,174, that 2019 figure had been the highest figure recorded since surveys of this type began at +4% over 2018. Average spends per visitor in 2013 was approx. $1,000, which though an increase on a per head basis, represented an actual overall revenue decline from the event for the island's economy at approx. $48m. The average length of stay was down at 6.09 nights, with 79.2% staying in paid accommodation (32% camping); there was a 30.6% increase in those traveling to the island by air, with 90.7% of all visitors from the UK and Ireland and 50-64-year-olds the largest age group at 38.3% (18.9% were aged 65 and older, with just 20.2% below the age of 30).


Sources: AMD, IDN, FT, Reuters, PSB, MPN, BDN, MCN, AP, Bloomberg, MSNW, Electrek, electricmotorcycles.news, RideApart.com, Motor1.com, Cycle World, motorbikewriter.com