Phil Aynsley Saltarelli Collection Photos
Wicked winter weather got you down? Then pull up a chair and get cozy with your cpu monitor because photographer Phil Aynsley has got a treat in store for you! In the past he has published some terrific pictures of classic Ducati engines and the factory, but this time he’s turned his attention to the Saltarelli Collection in Fano, which houses a tremendous wealth of wonderfully vintage Ducati bikes! Just some really beautiful imagery… So check out the photo gallery at www.philaphoto.com/images/Ducatis-Italy2008/index.html !
Fast3r Beta Launches - Your New Tool For The Moto World
If you’re like me there are dozens of motorcycle related websites that you check on a varying basis. Some are daily reads, some are bi-weekly reads and some are perhaps once a month reads. Yet as the web continues to grow and expand it’s often times hard to keep track of all your favorite sites, all of the newest, coolest websites, and more importantly all of the news that you might be interested in, whether that’s who won a race or which brand introduced a new model to wet your appetite and thin your wallet.
Enter Fast3r.com with a cutting edge solution; The site is a brand new way to look at the motorcycle website landscape and it’s part news aggregation service, part motorcycle community and part technological revolution.
Several months ago I was asked to take part in the ‘private beta’ version of the site and in a matter of a few short weeks it became one of my favorite motorcycle sites on the net. Not only does Fast3r act like your trusted RSS News Feed program - except better - but the site also has a uniquely cunning web engine behind it that on more then one occasion has opened my eyes to a story that I probably never would have found on my own.
Late last week the site transitioned from a ‘private beta’ to a ‘public beta’ and avid motorcyclist and Fast3r head honcho Lowell Goss (who fwiw I’ve known for years) agreed to sit down with Twisting Asphalt to talk a bit more about the site and what we can expect from it in the coming days…
Twisting Asphalt: What’s the goal of fast3r for a motorcycle enthusiast?
Lowell Goss: FAST3R is meant to be the place you go everyday to satisfy your appetite to know what’s up in motorcycling. We are attempting to bring motorcyclists all of the world of motorcycle news and also make it easy to find only the best stuff or only the stuff about the niche you really care about. We have pages for most of the brands, race series and riding styles from supermoto to adventure touring to superbike. Fast3r allows you to share what you read with friends or follow what your friends are reading. Fast3r is also a way to participate in the community. It’s a central place to submit the cool story you find that you want to share and to comment on what you read.
TA: How did you come up with the idea for Fast3r?
LG: I am a serious motorcyclist (Dylan’s words, not mine) and I thought there were at least a couple of problems. I had some great sites that I read everyday, but I felt like I was missing tons of stuff that WOULD be interesting if I only knew where it was and wanted to put in hours to find it. So I guess there are really three problems. The first is being overwhelmed by a flood of stories, lots of duplicates and variable quality. The second was feeling like motorcycling online didn’t have a central place for the larger community to gather. And the third was feeling that I was also missing cool stuff buried in somebody’s blog or on some news site that was not know to me or my friends. If you go to wikipedia or digg or google, those places aren’t first and foremost about riding and bikes. They are tools. It takes a lot of work day after day to find cool stuff and that’s after wading through LOTS of irrelevant stuff. As a motorcyclist I wanted a place that was broad and deep and ONLY about motorcycles.
Ted Bishop, Riding With Rilke Author, Speaks With Twisting Asphalt
As Twisting Asphalt enters it’s fourth year in this brave new online world, I thought perhaps it was time to shake things up just a tad. So tonight I’m excited to announce the introduction of a new feature, or in web lingo, a new category, called, ‘Sharing The Passion’, which is intended as a look at or inside how other folks view riding and the sport of motorcycling…
As some of you might recall, a little more then a month ago I posted a short review of Canadian Professor Ted Bishop’s absolutely wonderful and engaging Ducatista riding memoir titled, “Riding With Rilke”. If you read the review then you know how highly I view the book, its author and the remarkable blend of riding observations and literary magic that Ted was able to weave on the page. That’s a really nice way of saying that if you haven’t read the book yet, you really ought to check it out 
So to kickstart Twisting Asphalt’s newest feature, Ted agreed to sit down and shed a little bit more light on the creative process that went on when he wrote one of the best motorcycle books ever written (imho that is…).
Twisting Asphalt: When I first picked up your book and read a bit about it on the internet, the first thought that crossed my mind was that whomever wrote this had to be a bit mad to take a Monster on a trek from Alberta to Austin. Of all the motorcycles out there - and even within the Ducati line up - the Monster isn’t exactly known as a serious touring bike. Why pick the Monster model for this kind of trip?
Ted Bishop: I wanted a bike that was a pure motorcycle, and that to me meant a light twin, no fairing. I had been rained on, once snowed on, and looked enviously at the Gold Wings in the Tim Horton’s parking lot, but I always came back to wanting to be out in the weather. I let the bike pace me. Together we sought out twisting asphalt, all the little back roads between Edmonton and Austin, but we also stopped every hour, at viewpoints, cafes, and those historical sites I’d never turned into. I’d done the non-stop cross-continent kind of trip in cars and knew I had that compulsion to Make More Miles. This time I wanted to taste each one. With its comfortably upright riding position and room for medium-sized soft bags the Monster was actually the perfect bike for the trip.
TA: A lot of riders look at Ducati motorcycles as being high maintenance machines that cost too much to repair, — yet the 2-Valve L-Twin in the Monster is one of the great engines of all time. To my way of thinking it’s nearly bullet-proof having been in production for almost 40 years in one form or another - In “Rilke” you talk about breaking the end of your brake lever during the trip, but you don’t get into the more usual maintenance such as changing the oil, the 600 mile service or the 6,000 mile service. During your journey did you face any major reliability issues or have to do any kind of maintenance?
TB: I’d heard the usual – the maintenance was frequent, difficult, and frighteningly expensive. But Brian set the carbs before I left and I didn’t do anything until I got to Austin, where I had the oil changed (and the chain replaced because of my inept tightening). Same for the ride back, the bike ran perfectly. It’s over 10 years old now and I’ve never had a problem. At a book launch the store owner gently backed into it, knocked it over and bent the foot brake, but other than that it has been fine.
TA: From everything I’ve read it sounds like “Riding with Rilke” was both an adventure while you were actually riding but also an interesting journey once you were back in Alberta in terms of turning your experiences into a book. Can you walk us through how the project started and it’s numerous iterations?
TB: The book was a journey in itself. I wanted to write a book about zooming across the landscape and not admit that I was an English professor. I pitched it to a New York agent who said, politely but in effect, “There’s dozens of you guys riding across the continent and wanting to write books. What do you do for a living? How is this part of it?” I couldn’t see how.
