If you’re looking to import a rare and unusual vehicle that was never intended for the US market into the country like today’s Yamaha TZR250, there are a few ways to go about it. Some of these desirable machines can be found in Canada, and others can be found already here in the US, imported at…
Update 8.26.2016: Sold! Congratulations to buyer and seller! -dc Far less common and cliché than the 916, the Ducati 851 represents the connoisseur’s choice for Ducati fans looking for a classic superbike. Although it’s hard to argue with the significance of the 916, it’s almost a victim of its own success. I mean, nearly the…
Introduced in 1986, the Yamaha TZR250 was the follow up to their RD family of sportbikes. Yamaha’s first go at a quarter-liter TZR had middling success: it wasn’t especially competitive next to more focused rivals from Kawasaki and Suzuki on track, but it was a far better roadbike. The TZR followed the standard two-fiddy two-stroke formula of…
Kawasaki’s ZX-7 Ninja was known in other markets as the ZXR750, although I’m really not clear on why. Calling your “Fireblade” a “CBR900” makes plenty of sense if your target audience is more excited by technical names than by evocative ones. But shuffling a couple letters and numbers around doesn’t send a very different message……
Unlike the roadgoing, but still-sporty TZR series, Yamaha’s TZ bikes were track-only motorcycles with performance far exceeding what road riders might expect from their diminutive displacements and dimensions: technically, the Yamaha TZ125 isn’t even pint-sized as this post title implies, since Google reliably informs me that a pint is actually 473cc, and even a cup…
The Honda CBR400 was produced between 1988 and 2000 and was a perfect middle step between the entry-level 250RR and the supersport 600. Don’t let that “learner bike” displacement fool you: the CBR400 was in every way a grown-up sportbike: the liquid-cooled inline-four featured gear-driven cams, a six-speed gearbox, triple disc brakes, and a lightweight,…
Many of the weird and wonderful bikes we like to feature on this site appear in time-capsule condition, as if Doc Brown put them in a trailer behind his time-traveling DeLorean and towed them from the distant year 1985 into… The future! Others are patched-up wrecks described as having “patina” with “90% tread left on…
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…
