Dani Pedrosa InfographicDani Pedrosa reached a another milestone in Grand Prix motorcycle racing this past weekend when he won the Japanese GP at Twin Ring Motegi.The Japan MotoGP win was Pedrosa’s 50th Grand Prix victory – eight in the former 125cc class, 15 in the former 250cc class, and 27 in MotoGP. This allowed him to surpass his Repsol Honda teammate, two-time MotoGP Champion Marc Marquez, who has 49 wins.
This also placed Pedrosa as the eighth most successful rider on the list of top GP motorcycle race winners:
Giacomo Agostini, 122 wins
Valentino Rossi, 112 wins
Angel Nieto, 90 wins
Mike Hailwood, 76 wins
Jorge Lorenzo, 60 wins
Mick Doohan, 54 wins
Phil Read, 52 wins
Dani Pedrosa, 50 wins
Pedrosa, who began racing motorcycles at the age of nine in the Spanish Minibike Championship, entered the 125cc class in 2001. A year later he took his debut win at the 2002 Dutch TT. He continued his winning ways, and achieved the 20013 125cc title, which he followed up with the 2004 and 2005 250cc titles.In MotoGP, he finished runner up in 2007, 2010 and 2012. Pedrosa has raced with Honda for every season of his Grand Prix motorcycle racing career, and his best season was 2005, when he garnered eight wins.The 30-year-old Spaniard’s Japanese Grand Prix victory was his first of 2015, and also his first since Brno 2014. Pedrosa is currently fifth in the 2015 MotoGP Championship with 154 points with three rounds remaining.
Hello everyone and welcome once again to Ultimate Motorcycling’s weekly Podcast—Motos and Friends.
My name is Arthur Coldwells.
This week’s Podcast is brought to you by Yamaha motorcycles. Discover how the YZF-R7 provides the perfect balance of rider comfort and true supersport performance by checking it out at YamahaMotorsports.com, or see it for yourself at your local dealer.
This week’s episode features Senior Editor Nic de Sena’s impressions of the beautiful new Harley-Davidson Low Rider ST that is loosely based around the original FXRT Sport Glide from the 1980s. Hailing from The Golden State, these cult-status performance machines became known as West Coast style, with sportier suspension, increased horsepower, and niceties including creature comforts such as a tidy fairing and sporty luggage.
In past episodes you might have heard us mention my best friend, Daniel Schoenewald, and in the second segment I chat with him about some of the really special machines in his 170 or so—and growing—motorcycle collection. He’s always said to me that he doesn’t consider himself the owner, merely the curator of the motorcycles for the next generation.
Yet Daniel is not just a collector, but I can attest a really skilled rider. His bikes are not trailer queens, they’re ridden, and they’re ridden pretty hard. Actually, we have had many, many memorable rides on pretty much all of the machines in the collection at one time or another.
From all of us here at Ultimate Motorcycling, we hope you enjoy this episode!