Innholdsfortegnelse for September - October 2025 i Classic Racer

When legendary motorcycle journalist Roland Brown approached us with a feature on one very special dirt/flat-track machine, my brain started whirring… Roland had a great story about the rebirth of Kenny Roberts’ famed (and fearsome) Yamaha TZ750 flat-tracker, a liquid-cooled four-cylinder machine that (tried) to lay-down around 100 peaky, two-stroke horsepower on the dirt ovals while competing against the more ‘normal’ 80-or-so bhp air-cooled, four-stroke V-twins. This bike was a short-lived attempt at upping the ante out on the ovals, and the story of how one very special machine was brought back to life is on page 66. My mind was whirring because I recalled seeing an amazing shot from our friend Don Morley, of Kenny literally going around a dirt-track corner on a Yamaha with the front-wheel in the…

Initially it was predominantly British riders who would – following the First World War – join the ‘Continental Circus’, the name for the racing family which criss-crossed Europe at that time. Fast-forward some 30 years to the mid-1950s, and the British contingent had been joined by more riders from the Commonwealth, notably Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Rhodesia, including, in 1955, the man who was soon to become one of the top privateers: Australia’s Bob Brown. Brown was born in Little Plains, near Inverell, New South Wales, but grew up in Sydney, where he drove taxis and worked as a motor mechanic. He began racing on the Australian dirt tracks using a KTT Velocette, and quickly attracted support, firstly from Ron Kessing then from the local AJS and Velocette…

Improbable though it may seem, Honda went three full seasons without winning Grand Prix racing’s 250cc World Championship with their all-new twin-crankshaft NSR250 introduced in 1998 – a title they’d only won once in the previous eight years. But at the start of the Y2K season, it seemed this would be rectified, with Japanese rising star and former National 250 champion Daijiro Kato joining HRC’s long-time 250GP contender Tohru Ukawa in an onslaught on the World title which, in the wake of Aprilia’s relegation to the also-rans after Valentino Rossi’s step up to the 500cc class, they were expected to win. It didn’t turn out that way, though, for Honda had reckoned without Yamaha’s feat in transforming their YZR250 into the finest all-round quarter-litre GP racer of its generation. Yamaha…

For a man who ended up achieving so much on two wheels, Neil Hodgson hated motorbikes when he was a kid. “I always find it funny that I had no interest in bikes at all,” he says. “My brother Carl is two years older than me, and he rode bikes when we were little. I used to have to go and watch him ride a Yamaha TY80 round and round a field, and I hated it. My dad was always trying to get me to ride it, but I would always just crash and give up.” But while riding a kiddie bike aimlessly round a field held no attraction for the young Hodgson, competition did: that would prove to be the lure that would hook him. He says: “After being…

You can’t not like Randy Mamola… Brash and brilliant on a bike and the best man never to have won the 500cc world championship. He would race at the very top level initially in the 250cc class and then the 500cc class from 1979 through to his final year in 1992, by which time the legend of Randy Mamola – the clown prince of bike racing – had been formed. Strangely, at the beginning there was just a shy young man who was far away from his home in Santa Clara. Don Morley, who took these photographs, says that – certainly in his early years: “Randy was a painfully shy young man who found it difficult initially to talk to anyone.” How things would change. Halfway through his debut year…

Off we went then to the rolling up hill and down dale beauty of Cadwell Park in Lincolnshire. Packing the van, we knew the forecast was for wet weather, so I put in as many wet tyres as I could find in the workshop. Better to be over prepared I thought, than caught with no tyres. With no practice for us this weekend, we got to Cadwell Park on the Friday evening, managing to set up in the paddock in dry l weather: which was a nice surprise. Saturday morning and the rain was still not with us. Adam Carson #43 went out for qualifying on the Yamaha FZR600R first. We had fixed the brake issues that prevented him racing it at the last meeting. Adam was very happy with…

Back in the 1970s, Saturday afternoon telly was magical. You’d be watching ‘World of Sport’, including Speedway then the half-time scores from football before the wrestling with Giant Haystacks versus Big Daddy – with a dash of Mick McManus thrown in (sometimes literally) for good measure. All of this was followed up with an early evening portion of CHiPs, with Erik Estrada and Larry Wilcox as Kawasaki-riding California Highway Patrol officers, and one man would be in both shows. That man was Bruce Penhall. As a speedway star for the Cradley Heath Heathens (1978-1982) he’d be on the telly as a sporting star going sideways on his speedway bike, and later would become an actor in the hit American cop show. That’s some transition... Born in California in 1957, Penhall…

A quarter of a century ago in 2000, Yamaha enjoyed an especially stellar race season. In the road racing categories it contested that year, Yamaha won five out of the 10 available World Championship titles. It won both rider and manufacturer crowns in both the 250cc Grand Prix and World Supersport 600 classes, plus the 500cc GP manufacturers’ Championship, as well as second place in the World Superbike rider championship after a controversial penalty inflicted on its rider Noriyuki Haga which Yamaha fought all season long on an official basis to get reversed. Instead, Colin Edwards clinched the WSB crown for Honda, the company’s only rider title that year, with the 125GP manufacturer crown the only other World Championship won by Honda in 2000. But Yamaha blitzed the 250GP World…

Choosing the greatest ever motorcycle race victory is impossible. Riders have been competing on powered bikes for well over a century – in numbers from two to thousands, in countries worldwide, and on surfaces from Tarmac via dirt to ice. Therefore, even attempting a short-list would be ridiculous. So, let’s just agree that Kenny Roberts’ win on a Yamaha TZ750 at the 1975 Indianapolis Mile dirt-track – 50 years ago this summer – was, if maybe not the greatest ever victory, then at least a unique and brilliant achievement. The man himself certainly thinks so. Never mind his two-dozen 500cc GP victories and hat-trick of world championships, King Kenny regards coming from the back of the grid to beat Harley-Davidson’s factory flat-trackers on a crazily powerful, almost unrideable – at…

UNTIL THE COWS COME HOME! Kiwi Dave Hiscock has one very good reason as to why he will not forget his trip to the Isle of Man to compete in the TT races of 1982… Quietly spoken, the tall, red-haired rider first came to the UK in 1981, and immediately opened a few eyes with his pace, eventually finishing a very creditable fourth overall in the MCN/Shell British Streetbike Series. Dave returned the following year, with backing from former Grand Prix racer and also New Zealand’s first ever TT winner, the late Rod Coleman. They also brought along a special monocoque aluminium frame designed and built by car constructor Steve Roberts, into which was housed a Pops Yoshimura-prepared 997cc Suzuki motor. The plan being to contest both the British F1…