Welcome to Friday Fudge. If it’s weird, funny, or strange motorcycle news, or it just plain won’t fit anywhere else on the site – you’ll find it here.
Racing towards infamy
What options does a rider have, if he crashes during a race and can’t get his bike restarted? Not many, really – which is likely why Brazilian racer Marlinton Teixeira was hoping for a red flag when he crashed his 250 during action on the grid.
Unfortunately for him, the red flag didn’t come, so taking a cue from soccer players around the world, he decided to fake an injury. Even more unfortunately for him, the whole thing was caught on video; his ploy didn’t work, and now officials are trying to have him banned from racing in the country.
Watch the video below!
http://youtu.be/Cpo5pt70Gco
Story source: Wheels
Put a stop to red lights
Smartphones – what are they good for? Well, besides being an excellent way to find a restaurant when you’re on a road trip, now some clever chaps have come up with a much more clever use that should be a boon to motorcyclists everywhere.
Engineers at MIT have put together a smartphone app that helps users avoid red lights. The app works two ways; first, it analyzes real-time street conditions; somehow, it’s able to read the colour of traffic lights to calculate when they’re going to change. By combining that information with your GPS data, the app can let you know how fast you need to ride to avoid the next red light.
The app also uses crowdsourcing to gather data from other users, which also helps the program put together an idea of where and when you’ll encounter red lights.
You can read more about the app here; now, we’re just hoping they can develop something similar for traffic cops.
Story source: Bikes in the Fast Lane
Wrench while you eat
What do you buy for the mechanic who has everything? How about a kitchen knife set? Sounds boring at first, but check out the ones we’ve got pictured here. In a pinch, you could even make them serve double use, getting a little culinary work in while you wrench on the bike. Just don’t slip as you may end up with something rather more serious than grazed knuckles.
So what kind of moron is going to be watching his phone that closely while riding down the street?
That video is amazing, I thought I was watching a Will Ferrell movie about bike racing.