Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/801507
IN THE WIND P40 MEET THE WORLD'S MOST BADASS SCOOTER H onda has just released this photo of the heav- ily modified Honda NM4 Vultus that Scarlett Johansson will ride in the upcoming anime/sci-fi thriller, Ghost in the Shell. The bike starts off as a standard NM4 but basi- cally gets turned into a sport bike with rearset pegs, a total bodywork transplant and what looks like hub-center steering. The 745cc parallel-twin NM4 was already a pretty gnarly looking scooter/cruiser/whatever you'd like to call it, but this version is certainly a cut above what you can buy at your local Honda dealer. Hopefully Honda sees fit to make this thing a reality, because it looks absolutely stunning. But I wouldn't bet on it. CN DORNA HINTS AT ELECTRIC SERIES ALONGSIDE MOTOGP RACES T he most powerful man in road racing, Dorna CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta, said the MotoGP rights holder is working on a series for electric motorcycles that could begin as early as 2019. "We are going to do some electric motorcycles soon," Ezpeleta told Spanish publication ES. "It will be a real eco-label and it will not be a world championship. We want to charge the batteries with clean energy and not with a compressor." Ezpeleta has been in talks with a company that will provide electrical charging stations at the races, which he hopes will total five in 2019. He also has plans to use the current crop of MotoGP riders and teams to give the fledging electric series as big a boost as possible. "We have a funny idea, which is to have the motorcycle management given to independent MotoGP teams," he said. "We have 14 indepen- dent teams and we want to have races of 18 riders, which would be 14 MotoGP riders and the four best Moto2 riders, if they want to." The advent of the new series would be the first major one for electric motorcycles since the FIM e-Power Championship, which officially stopped at the end of 2013. Currently, the biggest e-bike race is the Zero TT, the one-lap dash held on the Isle of Man at the TT festival every year. A new series with the MotoGP teams and brain trust involved might just push the technology into gas-powered bike realms, something Mugen Honda is currently doing after they clocked a 119.279-mph lap with TT hero John McGuinness in 2015. CN This isn't your average Honda NM4… The Mugen hit a 119-mph lap at the Zero TT—imagine what could happen for the future of electric motorcycling with the weight of MotoGP behind it!