Top 10 oddball 500cc and MotoGP bikes

Prototype racing should be the crucible in which the craziest and most ambitious ideas in motorcycling are tested – with the best of them filtering through to lower series and eventually even production machines.

But for every inspired concept there are dozens of failed efforts or madcap schemes that either didn’t work out as planned or, while successful on track, turned out to be simply too advanced to ever filter down to more mainstream bikes.

The oddball bikes featuring those ideas are often the most interesting, regardless of their relative success or failure. Here’s our top 10 weird racers to have appeared (or nearly appeared) at the highest level.

10. Blata V6

Remember when four-strokes were reintroduced to the MotoGP championship back in 2002? For months, even years beforehand, speculation was rife as to which layout would be the most successful, with many tipping Honda to produce a crazily-powerful V6 machine. That never happened, and no bike has yet graced the latest iteration of the premier class with more than five cylinders, but in 2005 a V6 nearly did appear from the unlikely source of Blata, the Czech purveyors of minimotos. Blata was tied in with WCM for the 2005 season, but after several delays the bike – which never seems to have got beyond being half-built – was ditched, leaving WCM to run its old Yamaha-derived four-cylinder machine for what turned out to be its last season in the championship.