Features

Classic Motorcyle Mechanics needs your help – and you could win a cash prize reward Here at Classic Motorcycle Mechanics, we want to constantly improve and we would really appreciate knowing what you think of our monthly fix of classic machines in order to help us make your magazine even better and give you what…

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Suzuki GSXR750 The GSXR750 was a revolutionary motorcycle with an entirely new air/oil-cooled motor developing 100bhp out of the crate and a lightweight alloy double-cradle perimeter frame. Weighing less than 180kg dry, the bike was a homologation special, the optional factory tuning kit upping power output to 130bhp. The Gixxer was unveiled to the public…

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Kawasaki A7SS The street scrambler concept can effectively be seen as a methodology to sell a bike to a sub-set of customers who fancied something a little different from the conventional street machine. Using as many overt references as possible to dirt and desert sled successes, the British factories positively poured bikes, with varying degrees…

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Kawasaki GPZ1100 Few highlights in a career of performance testing motorcycles stand out as vividly as when we were forced by the limitations of space on MIRA’s timing straight to take Kawasaki’s GPZ1100 – completely redesigned and tuned to be the world’s fastest roadster – to the Midland facility’s mile-long straights. On that last day…

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Honda XL250 has been a huge success The numbers are astonishing. 1325 wins from 1560 starts. No single machine we know of comes close to the stats of this 1979 XL250. It belongs to Neil Tuxworth, the man who runs the HM Plant Honda Racing team, which used to be Castrol Honda and has a…

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Yamaha DT175MX Variously used for general fun, commuting or green laning, the DT175MX proved to be possibly the best of the genre. Most ended their days as winter hacks then morphed to field bikes before being literally being put out to pasture and allowed to rot. All of which makes Sheila Ambridge’s latish MX version…

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Kawasaki Z650 In 1968 Honda launched the CB750. Jaws dropped, particularly at BSA–Triumph HQ, because the recently released three-pot Trident and Rocket lll had just been comprehensively upstaged. Meanwhile, according to lore, Kawasaki's plans to put their own 750 four on the market are shelved while they set to work on a bigger engine. In…

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Douglas LB special Striking specials have long been a feature of the classic world and some of the really special ones are the examples that perhaps don’t look too special or non-standard at a glance, which is a category this Douglas twin falls into. In car parlance it’s a ‘street sleeper’ – ie something that…

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Triumph T160 Trident 20 Triumph T160 Trident, 1975 With the BSA-Triumph group’s fabulous racing success with its 750cc triples in the early Seventies, the Triumph Trident road bike should have been better developed than it was. Dick Mann’s Daytona 200 race win in 1971 on a BSA triple showed that when properly prepared the bike…

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Yamaha RD250 Yamaha launched its first 247cc two-stroke twin, the YD1, in 1957. Following a series of piston port YDS models, the RD250 (for ‘race developed’) was launched in December 1972. The Yamaha RD250A was the first production road bike to use reed valves to control the incoming charge, giving rise to the ‘torque induction’…

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