Grand Prix motorcycle racing is the premier championship of motorcycle road racing, which has been divided into three classes since the 1990 season: 125cc, 250cc and MotoGP. Classes that have been discontinued include 350cc and 50cc/80cc. The Grand Prix Road-Racing World Championship was established in 1949 by the sport's governing body, the Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme (FIM), and is the oldest motorsport World Championship.
There were four classes when the championship started in 1949; 500cc, 350cc, 250cc and 125cc. The 50cc class was introduced in the 1962 season. Due to escalating costs that resulted in a number of manufacturers leaving the championship, the FIM limited the 50cc bikes to a single cylinder, the 125cc and 250cc bikes were limited to two cylinders and the 350cc and 500cc bikes were limited to four cylinders. The 350cc class was discontinued in 1982; two years later the 50cc class was replaced with an 80cc class, which was discontinued in 1989. In 2002, 990cc bikes replaced the 500c bikes and the class was renamed as MotoGP. 660cc bikes replaced the 250cc bikes in the 2010 season, with the class re-branded as Moto2.
Giacomo Agostini, with 15 victories, has won the most world championships. Ángel Nieto is second with 13 world championships and Valentino Rossi, Mike Hailwood and Carlo Ubbiali are third with 9 world championships. Agostini holds the record for the most victories in the 500cc/MotoGP and 350cc classes with eight and seven world championships respectively. Phil Read and Max Biaggi have won the most 250cc/Moto2 championships, with four victories each. Nieto won the most championships in the 125cc and 50cc/80cc classes with eight and six victories respectively.
Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, grand, motorcycle, racing, world and/or champions:
“Do your children view themselves as successes or failures? Are they being encouraged to be inquisitive or passive? Are they afraid to challenge authority and to question assumptions? Do they feel comfortable adapting to change? Are they easily discouraged if they cannot arrive at a solution to a problem? The answers to those questions will give you a better appraisal of their education than any list of courses, grades, or test scores.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1935)
“Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—
which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
—Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
“Kicking the heart
with pain’s big boots running up and down
the intestines like a motorcycle racer.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“One of the most significant effects of age-segregation in our society has been the isolation of children from the world of work. Whereas in the past children not only saw what their parents did for a living but even shared substantially in the task, many children nowadays have only a vague notion of the nature of the parent’s job, and have had little or no opportunity to observe the parent, or for that matter any other adult, when he is fully engaged in his work.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)
“While the Governor, and the Mayor, and countless officers of the Commonwealth are at large, the champions of liberty are imprisoned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)