The answer is no. Not this time, folks.

Nine months ago, we published a provocative article titled “The End Of Chad Reed’s 2015 Season?” that suggested his year could come to a premature end after contesting no more than three rounds of the 2015 Lucas Oil AMA Pro Motocross Championship. And it did, after MX Sports (the AMA Motocross promoter) stopped Reed from running a 360fly HD video camera on his helmet (a deal that is worth more than half-a-million dollars, according to Chad) because GoPro, a sponsor of the series, wasn’t going to allow it. Reed stopped racing motocross, closed down TwoTwo Motorsports, purchased a YZ450F and went on to contest the 2015 Monster Energy Cup, as well as the inaugural AUS-X Open in Sydney.

For season 2016, Yamaha Motor Corporation USA reintroduced its factory supercross team, naming 34-year-old Reed as their sole 450SX rider. The team was officially named Monster Energy/360fly/Chaparral/Yamaha Factory Racing and was unveiled just days before Anaheim 1, the opening round of the 2016 Monster Energy AMA Supercross series.

So, what’s up with this article’s provocative title? Here’s the inside line…

360fly CEO, Peter Adderton, was informed by Yamaha Motor Corporation USA ahead of San Diego 2 that Monster Energy wanted 360fly to change the colour of their logo (as the logos of both brands are bright green). Adderton was also told that 360fly promo models would have to be removed from the pit area at further rounds.

While this will not end Chad Reed’s 2016 season, it most certainly will mark the end of 360fly’s Yamaha SX team sponsorship. Reed will keep 360fly on board as a personal sponsor, and is expected to continue running logos on helmet and gear (not his bike, though).

Adderton has expressed outrage at the situation via social media: “What Monster fails to understand is it’s the sport and athletes that built their brand, not the other way around. They don’t own the sport and don’t have the right to tell other sponsors what to do.”

“Telling smaller sponsors what to do isn’t good for anyone, including themselves in the long run,” Adderton added.

After posting a photo of a squashed Monster Energy can, Adderton went on to post another image of several other brands (including X-Box, HTC, Spotify, Tic-Tac, Starbucks and Heineken) who “dared to challenge the system”, effectively calling out Monster for directly targeting 360fly.

What’s your opinion? Are energy drink brands abusing the power they believe they hold within competitive circles? For Transmoto’s take, have a read of the article (embedded below) that we published back in 2013 on the positive and negative influences that external brands (like energy drink and tobacco companies, for example) can have on our sport.

Sometimes, after a long day of testing cars on the dyno, you need to blow off a little steam. For the Sloppy Mechanics guys, that involves sacrificing a car to the car gods. 

This year, the car they chose as their sacrifice was a fourth-generation Buick Regal GS that was headed for the scrap yard. 

When it rolled off the assembly line 280,000 miles ago, its supercharged V6 made 240 horsepower. Stock power is never enough power, so they tacked on a turbocharger, added some NOS, and decided to have a little fun with it.


If you're going to intentionally send a car to the long highway in the sky, that's certainly one way to do it.

Want to fly on a United Airlines Boeing 747? You better hurry. 

United told pilots on Friday that it may retire all of its 747s faster than expected, with the last one leaving the fleet as soon as 2018. In the past, executives suggested the 747s could stay at United into 2020, or even later. 

"We are contemplating an accelerated retirement plan for the 747s, Howard Attarian, United's senior vice president for flight operations, said in a message to pilots. "If we do decide to head in this direction, we plan to accelerate widebody deliveries to replace this capacity,"

The planes aren't as old as you might think - many were delivered to United in the late 1990s - but maintenence costs are expensive, the airline says. That's in part because fewer airlines fly the 747 now, with many preferring cheaper-to-operate twin-engine aircraft.

"This is an aging fleet that many operators are beginning to exit from service and as this happens, support for the aircraft, especially in our spokes, gets more difficult," United said in separate message. A 'Spoke,' is an airport not considered a hub, like Shanghai or Beijing. 

According to its fleet plan released in January, United had 22 747s at the end of 2015. Under that plan, the airline expects to retire two this year.

For now, United flies 747s from San Francisco and Chicago. But this week, United also told pilots it will remove the 747 from Chicago in February 2017, leaving only San Francisco with 747 service.

United last addressed the 747 in detail on its April 2015 earnings call. At the time, former CFO John Rainey said the carrier could hold onto the 747s for a long time, according to the SeekingAlpha.com transcript. 

The 747 is something that we do intend to keep for a few more years we have a couple coming out of our fleet in the near future but some of these we’ve made some improvements to the operating reliability of the aircraft and we could expect to keep them for another few years.

They have another sort of big maintenance events in the 2020 time frame that that will be another decision point for us whether we want to extend them further at that point or go ahead and retire them.

Every single video you've ever seen of a Koenigsegg being thrashed at a racetrack has had Robert Serwanski at the wheel. As Koenigsegg's factory test driver, he's had the opportunity to do some pretty sweet stuff, like shatter acceleration and braking run records in the One:1, thunder around Suzuka Circuit, and set a lap record at Spa.

Needless to say, this guy's a good driver.

But when he's not throwing multi-million-dollar Swedish hypercars into corners, he's manhandling something much smaller. Mazda Miatas, to be exact. According to his LinkedIn profile, Serwanski has participated in the Swedish MX-5 racing series before working with Koenigsegg. Here's a video of him flying down the Ring in a Miata. Sometimes you don't always need 1,341 bhp to go fast.

In the latest chapter of Virgin Galactic’s space tourism story, Sir Richard Branson yesterday unveiled the company’s newest version of SpaceShipTwo, called VSS “Unity.” The craft is the result of a valiant effort by staffers to replace SS2 “Enterprise,” which, after 55 test flights – four of them rocket-powered – broke apart on ascent Oct. 31, 2014, over the Mojave Desert.

After an extensive NTSB investigation, human error was determined to be the cause of the accident. Co-pilot Michael Alsbury was killed, and pilot Pete Siebold was badly injured.
Helping to choose the name for the new Unity vehicle was none other than renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, who plans someday to fly on it (Branson has given him a free ticket). Hawking, who suffers from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, wasn’t present at the Mojave Air & Space Port for rollout, but he did offer thoughts via a pre-recorded four-minute message to the hundreds of attendees including Branson and his family, actor Harrison Ford and singer Sarah Brightman.

“We are entering a new space age, and I hope this will help to create a new unity,” said Hawking, 74. “Space exploration has already been a great unifier — we seem able to cooperate between nations in space in a way we can only envy on Earth. Taking more and more passengers out into space will enable them and us to look both outwards and back, but with a fresh perspective in both directions. It will help bring new meaning to our place on Earth and to our responsibilities as its stewards, and it will help us to recognize our place and our future in the cosmos — which is where I believe our ultimate destiny lies.”

Branson, 65, was clearly moved by Hawking’s interest in space, and responded. “We felt strongly that we should somehow make sure that Stephen remained a permanent part of Unity’s story, because so much of what he stands for resonates with what we at Virgin Galactic aspire to be,” said the billionaire. “So the Galactic Girl on the side of our proud Spaceship Unity now carries a banner using an image of Stephen’s eye.”Like the plan for predecessor Enterprise, Unity will be dropped from a mother-ship, light its rocket motor and carry six passengers and two pilots into space, considered 100 kilometers (62 miles) above sea level. The rides will be short and suborbital – ie, straight up and down – unlike ISS, which circles the Earth. Passengers will see the curvature of Earth and the blackness of space, while at the same time experiencing a few minutes of weightlessness. Current ticket price is $250,000.

VG’s commercial flights will be the culmination of work from the turn of the century when SS2’s predecessor, SpaceShipOne (built by Burt Rutan), flew pilots three separate times to space in 2004 to win the prestigious $10-million Ansari X Prize.

Other companies working on space tourism include Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which in January vertically launched its New Shepard vehicle unmanned into suborbital space and brought back the booster and capsule intact – and XCOR Aerospace, which is still in the development stages of its Lynx vehicle. Another company, World Sky View, is planning to take customers just above 100,000 feet in a balloon, technically not space but offering space-like views.

VG expects test flights of Unity to start later this year. Its 700 or so ticket-holders  seem confident that they will become astronauts within the next few years, as is Hawking. “If I am able to go, and if Richard will still take me, I would be very proud to fly on this spaceship,” said the scientist.

In the meantime,many future tourist-nauts are training for their flights in centrifuges and high-altitude supersonic MiGs, and on parabolic weightlessness flights over the U.S. and Russia.

No music; no commentary; no nonsense – just five minutes of aural bliss as a packed field of BMW M1 Procars duke out their 1979 Monaco Grand Prix round.

This is our sort of video.



This fabulous footage comes from the 1979 Monaco Grand Prix round of the 1979 BMW M1 Procar championship. The second round of the season, it would be won by Niki Lauda driving for Project Four Racing.

Lauda went on to take the drivers’ title in the series’ inaugural season, driving for BMW’s factory team for the first round at the Belgian Grand Prix before settling in with Project Four Racing for the remainder of the season. Hans-Joachim Stuck trailed by a handful of points to claim second, with Clay Regazzoni finishing third.

24 hours of le mans 1989
In the years 80, the cars came to more than 400 km / h in the great line of le mans. In 1990, for security reasons, were installed 2 Chicane, the video you check the show that it was at that time

Can't wait to see where people take those YETI SNOW MX's in upcoming years

One of the worse snowmobile big air crashes we've seen in while. Hopefully he had a good amount of power to a landing.

Fast Masters was a made-for-television auto racing series, broadcast on ESPN in 1993 that featured notable drivers over the age of 50, most of whom were retired from professional racing at the time. The Fast Masters series was a summer-long elimination competition, with identically-prepared, $750,000, TWR, Jaguar XJ220s racing on Bridgestone RE71 high-performance street tires. The races took place under-the-lights at Indianapolis Raceway Park, in conjunction with ESPN's Saturday Night Thunder. The cars carried the sponsorship of Havoline, and the series was officially sanctioned by USAC.

Close and intense racing ruled each night as championship winning veterans from Formula One, IndyCar, NASCAR, NHRA, Endurance racing and more, some who were well into their 70's, fought hard for every position. Considerable attention focused on the event, as many came out to witness the impressive and unprecedented lineup of legendary drivers.

Three-time Indianapolis 500 winner Bobby Unser won the championship, claiming the $100,000 top prize.