1978 a Yamaha motocross launch to remember!
The 1970s brought a resurgence of interest in off-road motorcycle sport of all kinds as the Japanese manufacturers painstakingly learned how to build such specialised machines before rapidly catching up with, and then sometimes even surpassing, those manufactured in Europe, east and west.
This trend was well under way when, in 1977, I joined Bill Lawless to help him launch a new weekly newspaper published by the tiny Morecambe Press in Lancashire called Trials & Motocross News. By then, the likes of Suzuki and Kawasaki were coming along strong in both national and international scrambling events, and I even bought myself a 250cc Kawasaki trials machine from Doug Hacking of Bolton to get into the spirit of it all.
Apart from pootling along the edges of Morecambe Bay with dear old Bill on summer’s evenings, and contemplating the meaning of life (of which we’d each had our share of unhappy experiences by then!) I tried a few Cheshire Centre trials to little avail -- the Kwacker still needed more development, particularly in the engine department, but nothing like the amount of ‘development’ that I needed!
At the time, motorcycling was enjoying an unprecedented boom, with one fabulous machine following another. Honda’s six-cylinder
