The Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme (FIM) is set to officially open the Racing Motorcycle Museum to the public, with doors swinging open on February 18, 2026, in Mies, Switzerland, right at the former FIM headquarters just outside Geneva.
What really jumps out is this: every single bike inside has a verified, no-asterisks race pedigree. Not inspired-by. Not period-correct. These are the actual machines that won titles, rewrote rulebooks, and dragged entire disciplines forward. That gives the place a very different energy compared to a typical motorcycle museum. You aren't just looking at history.
You're standing inside it.
That idea hits hard when you move from era to era. One moment you are staring at the 1949 AJS Porcupine that Leslie Graham rode to the very first 500cc Grand Prix world title. A few steps later, you're face-to-face with Mike Hailwood’s jewel-like 1967 Honda RC166, still looking impossibly delicate for something that screamed past redline at absurd rpm. Then it fast-forwards again to Jonathan Rea’s 2016 Kawasaki Ninja ZX-10R, the bike that carried him to the second of six straight World Superbike championships.
The same approach carries across disciplines. Off-road fans get proper icons like Hubert Auriol’s 1981 BMW R80 GS Dakar winner, along with Jordi Tarrés’ 1989 Beta Zero prototype, Stefan Everts’ 2006 Yamaha YZ450F MX1 title bike, and the purpose-built Zaeta DT450RS Francesco Cecchini used to win the 2019 Flat Track world championship. Seeing these machines together makes it obvious how wildly different racing problems get solved with metal, suspension, and geometry.
The museum also keeps things current. Parked among the legends are 2025 championship-winning bikes raced by Marc Márquez, Toprak Razgatlıoğlu, Toni Bou, Daniel Sanders, Josep Garcia, Bartosz Zmarzlik, and Romain Febvre. It is rare to see modern champions represented this quickly, and it reinforces the idea that racing history does not stop. It just keeps stacking up.
Everything is organized around three themes: Heroes, Technologies, and From Race to Road. The point is not just to celebrate winners, but to show how racing advances engineering, safety gear, and ideas that eventually filter down to street bikes. There's also a Paddock Café streaming races and a Simulator Zone that lets visitors sample virtual motocross and circuit racing.
The FIM Racing Motorcycle Museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 10:00 to 18:00, and it's accessible via an easy train ride from Geneva. If you care about how racing actually shapes motorcycles, this one looks a lot less like a museum and more like a timeline you can actually walk through.
Source: FIM
