Update: eBay shows sold at $7000. Congratulations to buyer and seller! -dc Yamaha saw an opportunity in the late 1980’s to use their TZR250 two-stroke drivetrain and possibly show up on – ABC’s Wide World of Sports’ The Superbikers – ( well, maybe just during a commercial break ). A longtime friend of RSBFS, Moto2…
As rare as the 250cc two-stroke sportbikes are on these shores, the Kawasaki KR1-S is the rarest of them all, limited edition models of bikes like the NSR250R SP aside. Considering Kawasaki made some of the hairiest two-stroke sportbikes of the 1970s, it’s surprising that Kawasaki seemed largely uncommitted to the class, making just enough…
In the way cool archives of rare bikes there are undoubtedly some weird and wonderful ones. There are always surprises and bikes not many people have heard of, and there are always some real gems hiding behind the uber popular homologation crowd. Today’s find, a 1976 MV Agusta 350 is the perfect of example of…
Largely forgotten now, especially by modern sportbike enthusiasts, Laverda was once a serious player in the Italian sportbike scene of the 1970s. In terms of reputation, anyway, if not in actual production numbers. Their big-bore parallel-twin was supposedly heavily “inspired” by Honda’s parallel twin design of the period, and Laverda’s grown-up engine was heavily overbuilt…
I’m a huge Laverda fan, so it’s disappointing their attempted resurrection in the 1990s didn’t work out. It wasn’t that bikes like this Ghost Strike weren’t any good: the beam frames were designed by the famed Nico Bakker and handling was generally considered excellent, even superior to Ducatis competing in the same segments. The standard…
The 1976 Yamaha RD400 came out screaming in 1976, a mag-wheeled exclamation point on Yamaha’s range of popular, fast-paced two strokes. To make sure the message landed, Yamaha re-tooled its factory to build the RD400’s parallel twin, which was more than just a rebored version of the RD350’s mill. A longer stroke necessitated new crankcases,…
The entire class of 250cc two-stroke sportbikes has alwasy been forbidden fruit for US-based sportbike enthusiasts. The last real road-burning stroker was the RZ350, a bike that can certainly hang with much more modern machines and punch well above its weight, but the 18” wheels and bikini-fairing mark it out clearly as a bike from…
We tend to think (often and fondly) of Laverda building big bikes. With triples. The Jota, the RGS and the Mirage, for example. But before those, Laverda created smaller bikes too, such as the 500cc parallel twin. And in the hit-and-miss world of European bikes in the 1970s, the Laverda 500 – while extremely competent…
