THRIFTY SHADES OF GREY
Join us on a trip down memory lane as we get to know some of the best bikes that may, or may not, have been available at your local bike dealers in the mid-Nineties.
Back in the early 90s you may have thought that your Casio digital watch and your stack of Beavis and Butthead video tapes could make up for your so-last-century permed mullet back. But you’d have been wrong. Chop the outdated mullet in for a pair of Peter Andre-style curtains and flog the videos to your local Blockbuster store ‘coz it’s 1995 and if you really want some street cred you can do a lot worse than finding yourself a lightweight, sporty little street-bike with bags of attitude. And there were a bunch to choose from – but you might have struggled to find them down at your local dealership.
Why’s that? I hear you ask. Well back in 80s and 90s the Japs had a penchant for manufacturing bikes for their own market, usually smaller capacity supersport machines, owing to their domestic laws regarding the CC of road bikes. And it was assumed that the cost of some of these bikes would price them out of the European markets, so most of them were destined (as far as the manufacturers were concerned) to remain within the land of the rising sun.
But that’s not what us Brits, with our varnished pine kitchens and our inflatable settees, thought – oh no! We wanted screaming inline-four 400s just as much as we wanted smoky 250cc two-strokes, whether the Japs wanted us to have them or not. To that particular end, the grey import scene had dealers and investors importing Japanese bikes over to the UK and mainland Europe by the container load, and we just lapped them up. There was even a Grey Bike magazine, which celebrated the wide variety of models that were available through the various UK-based grey/parallel importers of the time
Strangely, what constitutes a ‘grey bike’ isn’t black and white, it seems (see what I did there?). When many of us riders think of ‘grey imports’ we think of the rare stuff that you couldn’t ever
get hold of in the UK such as the Honda CBR400RR Tri-Arm or Gull-Arm, or CBR250RR MC22 and definitely the two-stroke Honda MC-series NSR250 family. If you loved Suzukis, you’d look at the GSX-R400RR, or get hold of an SP version of the RGV. Similarly you could get a hotter version of the two-stroke KR-1S which was in the UK showrooms, or go for older H1/H2 styled versions of the ZXR400 and even get a 250cc version. Yamaha would have older versions of its FZR400 coming in by the container load, often sharing space with two-strokes that we should have got officially, if there was a god: the TZR250 reverse-cylinder 3MA and later the V-twin TZR250 3XV.
So to get a taste of the bikes flying around when I was a nipper, Dangerous and I assembled a stable of Japanese models that would have given you wood back then, and still should now. Honda’s VFR400 NC30, effectively a baby VRF750 RC30, just about stole the show in its class with its V4 engine; that was until its successor, the RVF400 arrived on the scene. And Yamaha’s EXUP valve equipped FZR400 might have been overshadowed at the time by the likes of the NC30 but how does it fare 25 years on?
The Kawasaki ZXR400 was not only a popular bike on the road but a massively popular one on the track too, so we couldn’t wait to test out its sporty credentials. And last but (for all those two-stroke fans out there) not least, emerging from a cloud of its own blue smoke, tonight, Matthew, the Suzuki is going to be an RGV250 VJ22.
Just before autumn cartwheeled its way into winter we managed to find a day filled with sunshine and dry roads so we grabbed it by the balls, drenched our armpits in Lynx Africa and went and had a large time. And to give you a bit more bang for your buck we have enlisted the help of our friend, and editor of our sister magazine Classic Motorcycle Mechanics, Bertie Simmonds, to give us the lowdown on all of the bikes, CMM style.