Yamaha in World Superbikes and EWC
Yamaha’s first four-stroke race bike was appropriately named Genesis. The FZR750 Genesis used an FZ750 engine and would’ve won its debut race – the 1985 Suzuka Eight Hours, part of the endurance world championship – but for a dropped valve in the final minutes. They learned fast; two years later Yamaha won the Eight Hours, their first big fourstroke victory.
However, when World Superbikes was launched in 1988 Yamaha were hardly ready. While Honda had the RC30 and Ducati raced their booming 851 V-twin, Yamaha riders had to make do with the more basic FZ750. They waited five years for the arrival of the YZF750, which still wasn’t good enough. In 1999 the R7 arrived, Yamaha’s first proper go at a WSB homologation special. The following year Noriyuki Haga and the R7 were fast enough to win the championship but the Sultan of Slide failed a doping test and ended up second.
It was another decade before Yamaha conquered WSB, largely thanks to the knowhow they’d gathered by winning in MotoGP with Rossi. The latest YZF-R1 owed much to Rossi’s YZR-M1 and was good enough to take American Ben Spies to the 2009 WSB crown. It had only taken Yamaha 22 years to get there! The closest Yamaha have got to more WSB title success was Marco Melandri’s runnerup finish in 2011 and two thirdplace finishes by Michael van der Mark and Alex Lowes, in 2018 and 2019.
Yamaha won their first fourstroke world championship in 2004 when David Checa and William Costes took the endurance crown, aboard an R1. Since then Yamaha have won the longest-haul title on a further three occasions.