Tag Archives: cafe racer

Royal Enfield Continental GT – First ride

Royal Enfield has built a really good looking motorcycle with the new Royal Enfield Continental GT. Having gotten that out of the way, let me first touch upon how I happened to take a test ride on it. I landed up at the Royal Enfield Brand Store near my parents house with an intention of getting a test ride on the new Royal Enfield Bullet 500, the one with the carb.

The brand store did not have one available and since I had started filling out the form, I decided to ride this thing.

Royal Enfield Continental GT testing

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BMW R nineT – BMW’s way of celebrating its 90th b’day!

Production cafe racers are getting better!

BMW Motorrad celebrates its 90th anniversary in the BMW Museum. World premiere of the new BMW R nineT.

On Wednesday October 16th 2013 the BMW Museum in Munich provided a worthy setting for a very special anniversary in the company history of BMW AG: 90 years of BMW Motorrad. The climax of the event was the world premiere of the BMW R nineT.

bmw r ninet portrait

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ThunderDuck highway ride in the cafe racer mode

A ride with the Bike Nomads, to a small water-body, the Shoolagiri dam off Hosur road. The first part of the ride ended at the Reliance A1 near Hosur, where the Rotarians who were riding along too, returned. A few of the others carried on and had a nice ride.

Added inspiration to ride was that the 6th round of the national championships was round the corner and this is the only time I would get to test out the café racer positioning of the clip on handle bars and the rear sets.

Cafe Racer Abhijith Rao Bike Nomad

Pics by Uday.

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India’s first track days.

Track day weekend was fast approaching. Just one day more to start our journey to the Kari Motor Speedway Track at Coimbatore, a good 350kms from Bangalore. So, the bike was finally built , to a certain level, which if a dear old man I know were to describe would call it “good to go, some things are never satisfactorily perfect!” Next the bikes had to reach Anand’s house at daybreak or earlier to get onto the transporters that were to transport the 8-9 bikes. So, in the morning I took to the outer ring road for what would be a test of the bike at high speed. Continue reading India’s first track days.

The fabrication of a café racer – ThunderDUCK!

It all started off one day when I decided that I wanted to build a café racer kit on the Thunderbird. I had planned on the direction I would be taking with this project and finalized (at least in my mind) as to how the bike would finally look. This project took a step towards reality when over a session of beer and mindless doodling on Scottish Pub’s tissue paper; Prashanth told me that he had a café racer tank with him. Continue reading The fabrication of a café racer – ThunderDUCK!