Shades of grey...

Grey imports had a massive impact on the UK bike world back in the 1990s. We take a look at how an avalanche of awesome 250cc and 400cc machines shook up and left their mark on the industry.

Variety is the spice of life and so it is with motorcycles, too, so it’s a shame that we get what we are given – or at least what the UK importers think we would like.

But there was a time in the 1990s when all that changed, thanks to grey importers. Grey imports were models made by the Japanese but not officially imported into the UK. In the UK, Honda’s CBR, Suzuki’s GSX-R, Kawasaki’s ZZ-R and ZXRs and Yamaha’s FZRs all came in 600cc, 750cc and litre-plus flavours, but they also had an incredible range of smaller bikes that we never saw – not via dealer imports, at least.

The licensing laws in Japan at the time made it very difficult to ride, insure, or own any bike bigger than 400cc, and the rules were very specific on power, weight and speed. As such, there was a huge demand for sub400cc bikes in Japan. That, together with intense competition between the big four firms, meant some astounding bikes were produced, but sadly (for Japanese riders) there was an incredibly strict MOT-style road-worthiness test in Japan that was all but impossible to pass after a couple of years. Toshihiro Wakayama, a Japanese bike journalist and former 250GP racer, said: “From 1975, Japanese riding laws were set at 400cc and it was very difficult to pass the unlimited test. Another aspect was the inspection system for vehicles – motorcycles above 250cc have to pass the inspection every two years.”

Roger Campbell used to co-own grey import specialist Bat Motorcycles in South Norwood. He says that the Japanese economy had a lot to do with the appearance of grey imports in the UK. “Licensing laws were a factor, yes – they had a number of different licences for different capacities in Japan. But the main thing was they sold a lot of motorbikes there, and people didn’t keep them for very long.”

John Younge from Wemoto also ran a grey import business at the time, World’s End motorcycles in Hammersmith. He agrees: “The Japanese home market was very affluent – and they just didn’t buy secondhand bikes, so for them they had very little value. Also, they only used their bikes for leisure so mileages were low.” The result of all this: a huge glut of cool, Japanese Domestic Market (JDM) sub-400cc bikes, which were unwanted there. And the market in the UK was more than ready for them, starved as they were of much below 600cc. Official importer prices were also high in Britain’s recession-hit early 1990s: a new Honda CBR900RR FireBlade cost £7390 in 1992. “Just at the end of a recession in the late 1980s, people were still fairly poor,” said Younge. “And even the likes of Honda NTVs and CB350s were still expensive. We imported bikes because we couldn’t buy decent bikes here, and it was better to get them from abroad.”

The environment was perfect for a growth in unofficial or grey imports. The official importers of Japanese bikes in the UK had decided not to bring across many of the more exciting models; either because they didn’t think they would sell enough of them, or perhaps they couldn’t sell them at the right price. One exception was for racing: if you wanted to enter your bike into one of the productionbased racing classes, you had to officially import a certain number into the country to make the model eligible. So Honda brought in the NC30 VFR400 for a couple of years and Yamaha imported a few hundred FZR400RR SPs. Kawasaki had its ZXR400 from 1991-2002 and the twostroke KR-1S were regular imports. Similarly, Suzuki brought in the VJ21 and VJ22 versions of the RGV250, before refusing to bring in the VJ23 model. Its GSX-R400 and GSX-R250 were also never officially brought into the UK.

It wasn’t long before firms such as Bat, DK Motorcycles and World’s End were bringing in container-loads of exotic, nearly new bikes, and they were selling like hot cakes. “I ran the Bat shop in England,” said Campbell. “My partner would go to Japan for three months at a time and we had some Japanese colleagues there that worked with us. In 1990 we even opened our own warehouse in Tokyo.”

The supersport models grabbed most folks’ attention – the racereplica craze was strong, both in Japan and in the UK, so the GSXRs, ZXRs, FZRs and CBRs were big sellers. But there were other models too – small-capacity trail bikes like the Yamaha Serow 225 and Honda Baja were a success – and naked bikes, in particular, were very popular. Indeed, some of the most common bikes around first appeared in small-capacity form in Japan only. Kawasaki’s ZRX400 pre-dated the ZRX1100, as did Honda’s Hornet 250, which came out before the 600 and 900 versions.

Sadly, the little buzz-bombs that made the grey import world are becoming rare sights on the road. The two-stroke models fell by the wayside in the early 2000s, finished off by ever-tighter emissions regulations and declining sales. But what happened to the four-strokes? Why did bikes like the CBR400RR and CBR250RR stop being brought into the UK?

Firstly, the Japanese licensing laws changed. So the need to ride bikes 400cc or smaller declined in Japan. But the increase in strength of the Japanese yen, and the long Japanese economic slump were more relevant. The yen varied wildly in the 1990s: a pound was worth 285 yen in 1991, but only 131 yen in 1995, ending the 1990s at around 160 yen.

That meant the pound lost 44% of its value in Japan during the decade. Roger Campbell agrees: “A big reason for the decline was to do with exchange rates – the money wasn’t right. Japan also had a recession for so long that there weren’t as many decent secondhand bikes. They started to keep their used bikes and weren’t buying as many new ones.”

In addition, from the UK point of view, the average age of riders increased and it meant that it wasn’t as expensive for most riders to insure larger capacity bikes. Many looked at greys as an inexpensive steppingstone bikes to larger capacity machines, only to find the 400cc four-strokes were often of a higher specification than a British-bought 600cc sports bike.

Eventually middleweights came along like the Yamaha R6 and Kawasaki ZX-6R. These were much more exotic in terms of technology, bringing in upside-down forks, radial brakes and ram-air systems to the smaller class, and they offered much of the lightweight handling that the 400s had previously – with the extra with an extra 200cc of grunt.

The price of bikes fell in the late 1990s. Thanks in part to parallel importers – who brought bikes in from Europe through non-official channels – it became much cheaper to buy new European-market bikes. Given the choice of a brand-new 1999 Honda CBR600, or a used RVF400 NC35, for much the same cash, most people plumped for the 600. It all spelt disaster for the grey import sector, which declined through the 2000s.

But, there are plenty of us who’ll never forget the incredible little grey imports which – for a decade or so – made biking far more interesting.