From yowling two-strokes to the mighty YZR-M1
This summer Yamaha mark 60 years of GP racing as the second most successful manufacturer of all time
Yamaha may not have won as many grand prix races as Honda, but the Hamamatsu manufacturer is arguably still the greatest racing brand of them all.
The company contested its first grand prix in May 1961 and since then has always featured in GPs, either with factory bikes or privateer machines, unlike GP racing’s other great marques, Honda and Suzuki. During the last 60 years Yamaha has anointed some of motorcycling’s greatest world champions, including Phil Read, Jarno Saarinen, Giacomo Agostini, ‘King’ Kenny Roberts, Eddie Lawson, Wayne Rainey, Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo.
Slow start and factory spies
Yamaha started out making musical instruments – hence the tuning fork logo – in the late 19th century and expanded into bikes in the 1950s. Their first GP bike wasn’t even a Yamaha. The RA41 was made by rival motorcycle manufacturer Showa, which Yamaha bought in 1960. Yamaha engineers immediately set about transforming the two-stroke 125cc single into a bike that could challenge for grand prix honours. But they failed. The RA41 was lapped by the Honda four-strokes and MZ two-strokes when Yamaha made their GP debut at Clermont-Ferrand, France, in May 1961. The same went for its 250cc stablemate, the RD48 twin, basically a doubled-up RA41. Four-strokes were still dominant in GP racing at that time, but this soon changed, thanks to MZ’s two-stroke knowhow, which Suzuki stole in 1961. Just one year later Yamaha were also using this technology. How did this happen? No one knows for sure but most Japanese brands had spies working inside rival factories.
The result was an overnight power increase of almost 30 percent. When Yamaha riders and engineers arrived in Europe for the 1963 GP season they were immediately competitive – star rider Fumio Ito rode the RD48 to their first GP podium on the Isle of Man and their first victory four weeks later at Spa-Francorchamps.
At the end of the year the factory signed their first foreign star – Lutonborn Phil Read – and beat arch-rivals Honda to the 1964 250cc world title. Yamaha had arrived. And they’ve never left.
Two-stroke v four-stroke
The 1960s quickly developed into a fabulous era of race engineering as Yamaha and Suzuki two-strokes fought for supremacy with Honda four-strokes. Six decades later the three biggest Japanese factories are still at it in MotoGP.
In 1965 Honda built its fivecylinder 125 and six-cylinder 250, so Yamaha fought back with two of the wildest two-strokes ever to grace a racetrack.
These miracles of miniaturisation were the RA31 125cc V4 and the RD05 250cc V4. The 125 (44m x 41mm) needed a nine-speed gearbox to keep the tacho needle between 15,500 and 17,000rpm, where most
‘King Kenny Roberts won the 1978, 1979 and 1980 titles’