If you’re not into oil drilling and late-1970s Formula 1, you might be nonplussed at the handsome red and purple livery that graces this otherwise-standard 1986 Suzuki RG500 Gamma. But, under the alliterative name and the cool-if-dated graphics lies a story of early business success followed by a longshot investment in a passion project that…
The Turbo years were the wild west for technology mavens in the motorcycling world. For only a few short years did this persist, but while it did the space race was on! Every one of the Big Four came up with at least one turbocharged model, and each had its unique position in the market.…
Update 11.27.2019: SOLD in less than three weeks! Congratulations to buyer and seller! -dc Say you’re a Yamaha fan and you want to collect something significant. Where do you start? Well, rare homologation machines are always a great place to look. Think you want an OW-01? You might find that mighty machine to be very,…
Practical sportbikes like the Yamaha FZR400 generally weren’t babied and pampered, or cherished in the way that seems so common with Italian superbikes: for an FZR400 fan, “to cherish” means to flog mercilessly on a canyon road or tight track, passing bigger bikes around the outside on that skinny 140-section 18″ rear tire… But nice,…
The Yamaha FZR400 is becoming a rare beast, as they were only sold here for three model years and were handily outsold by their bigger siblings. That’s a shame, because the little Yammy was really a higher-spec piece than its 600cc stablemate, with an aluminum chassis instead of the bigger bike’s much less graceful steel…
Update December 2019: This bike has been sold to an RSBFS reader. Congratulations to buyer and seller! -dc As we spill countless pixels on aging, air-cooled weapons of yesteryear, bikes that ride on weird anti-dive forks and odd-size tires, it’s easy to forget that machines like the first-generation Yamaha R1 are quickly approaching classic status…
I know that the RSBFS reader loves a good two stroke. And what better to post than a well-kept Yamaha RZ350? The last of the true factory street bike smokers, the RZ was successfully imported into the US – and even California! – for a short while. And so while these are not grey bikes…
The RZ350 is a special sort of machine in the annals of RSBFS. The last of the 50-state factory two strokes, the little parallel twin that could utilized liquid cooling, a computer controlled adjustable exhaust port (YPVS), and catalytic converters. Even with all of this tech it was short lived on US shores, and even…