While many of the 80s bikes we’ve featured recently look relentlessly forward, spending their lives on the bleeding-edge of sportbike design, other manufacturers were necessarily stuck in the past, limited by budgets and working to maximize the potential of existing, sometimes moribund designs like today’s Laverda RGS1000. Laverda had certainly earned its fair share of…
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…