Hello everybody and welcome to Front End Chatter – Britain's best biking podcast, powered (and empowered) by the wondrous two-wheeled website known as Bike Social (that's www.bikesocial.co.uk – and you should definitely check them out).

It's episode 61, which as everybody knows is the **must remember to search Google for an obscure name of somebody who once raced a motorcycle with number 61 here** episode. Which, ironically, has very little racing at all, being mostly composed of:

• Chatter about the front end of BMW's R1200GS, and how the previous service campaign – not a recall – to fix the fork stanchions is, erm, ahem, cough, now a recall.
• Martin rides to a village in the German Alps to drink beer in the company of 40,000 bikes, while Simon rides to a café near Whitchurch for the world's largest all-female bikers meeting.
• Aprilia's Shiver 900, and why are "middleweight"s getting so big now?
• Plus roughly one trillion and seventy-two of your finest emails, covering everything from Yamaha Tracer adverts, insurance groups, the best bikes ever to grace the silver screen, Simon gets his helmet out to demonstrate something to Martin, is the new Fireblade changing its tune or is that just the rider, and lots and lots and lots more.

To chatter back to us, email anything@frontendchatter.com or Twit us on @SimonHbikes and @Mufga

And, of course, go take a look at Bike Social!

Welcome to Front End Chatter E60, sponsored as always by our good friends at www.bikesocial.co.uk and backed by Bennetts, the bike insurance boys and girls. And what a scandal-laden FEC we have this week:

• despite a truncated MotoGP/racing section we still manage to disrespeculate on Lorenzo’s future at Ducati and compare his debut season so far to Rossi’s disaster in 2011...

• get into the financial fall-out from the shambles formally known as the Circuit Of Wales...

• details of the new Ducati V4 replacement for the Panigale, after the Final Edition – which, it turns out, might not be so final after all, and will be available from September this year and will cost £35,000...

• ...and why the V-twin is the most versatile engine layout ever built

• BMW’s service campaign to check all R1200GSs and GSAs built between late 2013 to date, to make sure the forks aren’t about to fall off – and why we should or shouldn’t be alarmed by it

• and how Honda’s blighted 2017 FireBlade, both base and SP versions, stands up at a Mallory Park track day – a Bennetts Mallory Park track day, no less – against Suzuki’s new GSX-R1000R

All this takes so long we don’t get time to read any emails at all, so apologies – but at least it means we’ll have a another non-racing FEC in a few weeks’ time!

Thanks again for listening, and please email us at anything@frontendchatter.com with questions and comments, or get us on the Twitter:

@SimonHBikes & @Mufga