Smaller versions of big bikes are often built to a price. Even if they are serious sports machines, they can often lack some of the shiniest bells and whistles of the top-of-the range bikes. But not so the Yamaha FZR400. In fact, the 400 was actually considered to be a more sporting machine than the…
The road-going two-stroke fours from Suzuki and Yamaha normally tend to look a little awkward to my eye. The wheels and tires look too skinny, the brakes too small, the fairing bulbous and a little ungraceful. That all goes out the window with this 1988 Suzuki RG500Γ race bike, which seems better balanced all-around, and…
The TZR250 was Yamaha’s entry into the hotly-contested quarter-liter class wars that raged throughout the 80s and 90s. Early TZR250s were powered by a fairly conventional liquid-cooled parallel twin, and the last generation used a 90° v-twin like rivals from Suzuki and Honda. But in between, Yamaha experimented with an interesting solution to give the…
Relisted from last November, with a 20% price reduction – Martin In the early 1990s, Moto Guzzi was trying to revitalize their staid image and appeal to a younger, more sporting audience. Famous Guzzi tuners Ghezzi and Brian were brought in to style the new top-shelf sportbike, and the result was a machine uncharacteristically elegant…
Well here’s a real curiosity, another bike from the era of experimental engine configurations. Prior to the introduction of the KR-1 featured earlier this week, Kawasaki’s quarter-liter two-stroke sportbike reputation was upheld by this bike, the KR250. Although it’s powered by what is technically a parallel twin, the Kawasaki KR250’s engine is configured more like…
Well this one’s pretty exciting: the recent influx of two-stroke sportbikes has been notably lacking in Team Green Kawasakis like this KR-1, thought by some to be one of the best, or at least the craziest, of the breed. Considered by the press to be a significantly better performer than the RGV, the KR-1 was…
Styled to resemble the RS250RF race bikes, the Honda NSR250 used a gorgeous aluminum twin-spar frame, triple disc brakes, and a whole host of lightweight, mass-centralizing tricks you’d normally expect to find on bikes with a much larger displacement. The NSR250 was motivated by a liquid-cooled two-stroke v-twin with two carburetors and Honda’s ATAC “automatic torque…
Bimota’s successful line of Ducati-powered bikes seems a bit unconventional for the brand, considering they’d always been about creating machines that fused powerful, well-engineered Japanese engines with lightweight, race-bred frames to create bikes that were more than the sum of their parts. But machines like this DB4 seemed to be more about just distilling a…