Product Description

Yamaha is one of the great names in motorcycle racing with a committment to racing, rather than just building and selling the bikes commercially. It was Yamaha who produced the first over-the-counter racing superbike, the TZ750 whilst also gaining over 350 GP victories to date. Colin MacKellar, with the help of interviews with some of the key personalities that influenced Yamaha's fortunes and covering both technical advances and racing success, charts the development of the first YA1 and its successors. He looks at the early factory RD and RA racers, the giant-killing TDs and TRs and the mythical TZ750 superbike, before rounding off the story with an analysis of the YZ250, the mainstay of production racing over the last 20 years, and the OW and YZR factory racers in the Blue Ribband 500cc GP class.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #136961 in Books
• Published on: 1995-08-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 191 pages

Customer Reviews

A Yamaha Techno-Fest
Whenever I need factual information about Yamaha's racing machinery, Colin MacKellar's 191 page masterpiece is the one I turn to. Apart from being a very readable story of Yamaha's racing efforts spanning almost 4 decades, it places the reader in amongst the spanners, dial gauges and sweat of the pit.

The author skilfully weaves the racing storyline amongst individual reviews of every significant factory and production racer. Alongside a host of fairings-off photographs, these reviews explain the technical changes that provided track improvements over previous models.

Authority is provided by the author's technical sources that reads like a Who's Who? of Yamaha racing. Kel Carruthers, Erv Kanemoto, Trevor Tilbury, Warren Willing, Bud Aksland, Mac MacKay, Ferry Brouwer and Vince French. The rider's perspective is added by Giacomo Agostini, Phil Read, Wayne Rainey, Rodney Gould and others.

An Appendix provides the full specifications of all forty-three of Yamaha's over-the-counter 250, 350 and 750 racers starting with the TD1 of 1962 and for technophobes like me, there's an excellent detailed index.

This is a first class book that has rightly become the Yamaha racing fan's most important resource.

Pure Two-Stroke Porn
A great reference book that you will go back to time and time again - especially when you need that two-stroke fix!