‘Tis the season for seasons greetings, wish lists and good old fashioned commercialism. RSBFS tends to see a lot of great bikes in the week prior to Christmas, and this RZ500 is no exception. With clean plastics, upgraded suspension, a Rick Lance rebuild and an impressive list of updates, this particular RZ promises to be…
Update: A reader reached out to note that, “The forks are missing the compression and rebound clickers, those are R forks.” Seller replied back to us, “I pulled out the books and it looks like the first year for the RS model was a 3XV8 which had the same forks as the standard R model.…
Just in time for the holidays, our buddy Gary in Utah has put up yet another of his grey-market wonders, this time in the form of a bone-stock 1991 Suzuki RGV250. The bike has covered a little over 10,000 miles and has been well looked-after in that time, but it does bear a few scuffs…
The Yamaha RZ500 promised GP-bike glory for the every man when it hit the scene in ’84, with a quartet of exhaust pipes poking out at odd angles producing a biblical scream. By ’85, Suzuki had rained on the parade a little with the RG500, which was lighter, more powerful and a few notches crazier,…
12.13.2017: Bob has decided to upgrade to a Featured Listing after we first posted this bike on November 30th. Links updated to latest auction. Good luck to buyers and seller! -dc When Yamaha and Suzuki dropped their 500cc two-stroke race replicas in the middle of the 1980s, the bikes effectively stopped the oil-burning horsepower wars…
1.15.2018: The owner has informed me that this bike has sold! Congratulations to buyer and seller! -dc What could have been the Bimota BB-2 was called the V-Due and had Bimota’s own engine, a modern two-stroke, fuel-injected 500cc twin. However the army of engineers Bimota didn’t have allowed the project to proceed with a faulty…
The waning light of the two-stroke era really brought out the best Japan had to offer, with a spate of lightweight 250cc road racers with DOT concessions that would pull the front wheel more or less at will. Suzuki’s RGV250 v-twin topped the heap, with prodigious power, decent reliability and years of development to keep…
Honda’s two-stroke NS400R was ostensibly intended to capitalize on their Grand Prix racing efforts, but with less displacement and one fewer cylinder than rivals from Suzuki and Yamaha, it got lost in the shuffle at the time and suffered from a perceived lack of hairy-chestedness, compared to its 500cc competition. So why did Honda go with…