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I'm getting extremely excited for this years VCGP! 2019 I had a blast on my KTM SAR 1290 racing the Adventure class, and also making this the most challenging and physically exhausting riding event I've ever done. Picking that heavy bike up over and over at 6000ft elevation was rough. Due to the Plannedemic 2020 was reluctantly cancelled by organizers, but fortunately 2021 it's back and I'm ready! Race starts Saturday for the A and B groups, but @motochefarwi and I will carpool up the hill from valley on Sunday. This year I'll be on my Husky 701 in the Enduro C group and Arwi on his 990 in the Adventure class! Weather is looking interesting with chance of snow and highs in the 40's! I'll make sure to post more here!

Bike prep in motion, spooned some Dunlop d908rr on the “Heddy” KTM 990. Gonna be one helluva a race!

Photos by @motolady are up! Click here Use them how you like but please attribute photo credit to MotoLady/Alicia Elfving. She worked hard for us and this is her livelihood. Let's help her out. hashtags: xladvhighsierra2021 Here are a few examples

Hello everyone, we are planning an epic ride to central and south america starting in April 2022. We are currently checking the motorcycle insurances. My understanding is that every country has his own policy and that it is often best to purchase at the border. But those infos are a bit outdated so I'm wondering if someone has some updated information about that ? Maybe starting with central America, Mexico to Panama ? Thank you in advance !

I got my Mexican insurance online before I crossed from Lewis & Lewis and printed it out as well as had as a pdf. Don't recall how I did it in Guatemala but you can purchase at the border and it's usually not difficult or expensive. Don't recall El Salvador either. Nicaragua I bought it at an insurance company office in Esteli and it was cheap. Costa Rica will require you to buy it then and there at the border and it's cheap and easy. But they want you to buy covid health insurance too which is like $11/day which is a ripoff. Panama was the biggest pain in the ass as the insurance guy wasn't there so I had to wait two days for him. Finally someone took pity on my and called someone they knew who came and sold me a policy he arranged right there on his cell phone. Some countries don't require moto insurance though.

Hello to all riders, I am on vacation, and I am planning a trip, riding through Mexico. I am from Israel, and I plan to buy a motorcycle in the United States and go through the paperwork and the red tape when I cross the border. Going through the Benjercito webpage, there is no option for any other passports but American or Canadian. I wondered if anyone here knows the procedure well and can tell me if a non-American/non-Canadian can make it? I will be traveling with my Israeli passport, a tourist visa, and the FMM, which I will also be planning to do after the crossing. Does my question make sense?

So I got a press briefing yesterday and wasn't supposed to say anything about it until Oct 5 but I see Triumph USA is at least talking about the new 660 Sport so I'll limit it to simply that for now. I will have all the details for you then (Oct 5).

Did a nice little two day adventure two up to Jardín and Jericó this week. My gf got a Klim Artemis suit which she really likes and this was her first chance to wear it outside of short city rides. We saw a lot of rain and mud but I was the one who got the most dirty [emoji23]. Must have been all the mud. The dirt roads aren’t that bad but we came upon a truck carrying construction materials for road maintenance further up that got stuck. I tried going around but it was a wet muddy trench and the pegs and shifter we digging into the sides of the trench so we decided to back it out. Didn’t take too long but the video is pretty funny.

@Barry Michael Wehrli put together a nice video here. I searched and found more from Olivier And not sure who did this one

In case anyone is interested, attached are pix of my Dunlop Trailmax Mission tires at 13k miles on a Super Tenere T12. I plan on keeping the front on, and changing out the rear, although I could certainly ride the rear for a while longer on-road but I have some offroad planned in September. I have found these tires to be excellent, but I have very limited experience to compare them to. The previous tires on this bike were Anakee street tires. Ive never ridden knobbies, so this tire is my entire universe, but it certainly delivers on mileage

We have three reviews so far. You can check them out here. While @greedyg shows his rear tire just shy of 2k miles and rides a heavier and more powerful bike, @GeoMoto has a lighter and less powerful bike shows his rear about the same miles but with a lot more wear. He (geomoto) thinks this may be due to the power delivery on the T700 and that it doesn't have traction control. Then @Manybikes says in his video his rear is about half worn with just a few hundred miles on it. Brent Needham (owns Adventure Center Powersports in Bakersfield) has a 950 and rides like a bat out of hell and says he gets like 5k miles so really confused here. I know they say "your mileage may vary" (YMMV) all the time but I'm seeing that play out quite a bit here. I had a troll on Instagram saying ridiculous things about low mileage like "I got barely 700 miles" and I found those to be not believable. I say troll only because the guy kept messaging me like a maniac telling me "they're a 700 mile tire!!!" I said dude, chill! If that's what you believe then you're free to write a review at the forum (he never did). If you ride a 1290 like @RogersW then maybe. I also saw a competitor make a negative comment (unprofessional, IMHO). So being a market researcher I decided to do some research of my own. I read a LOT of reviews of the tire at other forums and online retailers and the consensus does seem to be they get good mileage. At Revzilla (as of this writing) there's 11 reviews and 6 mention long life. One says short lived but quantifies it as "less than 4k miles." If I got more than 2600 (my experience with a TKC-80 rear) then I'd call that longer tread life. One review at Chaparral says "after 1,000 miles of AZBDR they showed very little wear." Fortnine has four reviews and one mentions "20% longer than similar purpose tires;" none mention low mileage. In a way, these are looking to be kind of the reverse of what I saw with the Anakee Wild. That tire had a LOT of people saying ~2700 miles and just a FEW saying 6k-8k. This one seems a lot saying good mileage with a few saying poor mileage. What's "good mileage?" 10k on a K60 rear is good mileage but it's not a tire I'd ever use. The older (heard the reformulated the rubber) Kenda Big Blocks I used to call a "900 mile tire" because that's all they got for me. The Vee Rubber VTM 401's got about the same as the Kenda's. The Kenda's and Vee Rubber both have great traction but I'm more of a $/mile guy and prefer more durability. I've decided I just need to try them out for myself and see. I'll put one on when I fly back on the 9th. My 990 doesn't have traction control either (nor does Greg's 950) so I'll have to go simply on my own riding style and experience with other tires. If I get more than 2600 miles (what I got from a TKC-80 rear) then I'll feel more confident calling this a high mileage tire. 2600 miles is my "Mendoza line" you might say.

Welp... 5k miles with zero complaints but picked up a nail in the rear right after I met the local Motoz dealer (hmmmmm [emoji2955]) so I retired them early. I will do a complete review soon but suffice it to say I’m glad I had the chance to try these tires. I’d worked with Dunlop a bit ahead of their launch and I’d heard good things about them. I saw Justin Mackie completely rail his Africa Twin last year in Montana and Idaho so I saw them put through the paces. For me, I’d never really wanted a 50/50 tire but this type of adventure touring is better suited for it. They’re a dream on the pavement and not bad at all in the dirt. Most of the dirt I’ve done here though is pretty tame but that’s a perfect task for a 50/50 tire. I’m probably not going to ride these at a High Sierra or Mojave but this type of riding they’re perfect. Seems a shame to retire them huh? I’m stunned they look so good with 5,000 miles on them. My guess is they could have gone 9-10k.

Well, I have put about 700 miles on the Dunlop Trailmax Mission tires since the original post, and the majority of those were at the 2019 Geico Adventure Rally in Julian (Nov 7-10). I have some pics on IG (@shutterrev), including a short clip of how well they can brownout your trail buddies During the rally they were ridden edge to edge front and rear on the roads, and fared quite well on multiple levels out there on the trails. The down and dirty... (updates to my previous review) Handling, profile, cornering: Excellent street manners, you can chase down crotch rockets on your way to the trails just fine. They don't have as aggressive a fall-in while cornering as some of the other tires I have run, the front seems to have a gentler profile, just took some slight getting used to and they are fantastic on the road. Noise: None How do they work off-road?: Really well for me, I am just an Average Joe ADV rider, I will easily call these tires worthy of 50/50 title, all day, take it or leave it. I rode out to Font's Point and back which was relatively sandy the entire way with no "line" to speak of, and as long as I kept giving gas, I didn't fall on my ass, no herky-jerky feedback in the sand from the front, just pushed right through. Did Boulder Creek to the falls or whatever it's called and up to Eagle Peak, and that fap-worthy hard flat high speed dirt after that.... on the fast routes you can just riiiiiiiiiiiip, for the more technical black diamond bits, I never felt like the tires let me down. All the other blue routes we ran that had good-good dirt I think my buddies I was riding with would agree I was having too much a lot of fun browning them out with roost ripping around on these tires, the rear has such a consistent and predictable spin when grabbing throttle that you can probably get too comfortable going faster than you should be on a not knobby tire off-road. That being said I never felt like the rear or front were going to danger-level step out on me. Tire wear: Only 700 miles on the clock for these, can't tell if any tread-depth has been used at all... the fuzzys are gone though. The edges of the treads are rounded off slightly from sand, and wheel spin in dirt, but I think after I street these back and forth to work for a few weeks they will be sharpened back up. The tread didn't tear, or chunk out at all during the rally despite being used. I have high hopes for mileage on these... so stay tuned for the end of life report for this set... Sidewalls: The tread extends down the sidewall I am not an expert dirt or sand rider at all, but the tires did well in the sand I was in at my average level of sand things, I did feel more confident than I have in times past... Not sure if that's just a good day, or maybe these tires are doing something right with the extra grabby thingies on the sides. In summary, they did really well on the Rally, and continue to be great daily commute tires at the same time. We hit easy, medium, and black diamond last weekend and I was never anywhere thinking to myself "F these tires", instead I was continually surprised that they were just doing the things that needed doing for being 50/50 - If these get the miles I hope they do, I will be buying another set after these are spent. - Nick Heading home from the Rally shot:

Great article here on the engine this bike will have... Looks like about 75 hp with a torquey feel