Ahead of its time?
The face of the global motorcycle market was changing in the mid-1990s with many riders wanting something more manageable and less aggressive than the superbikes that had begun to dominate the scene in previous years.
From the late 1980s Ducati had been producing simple sports machines under the famous ‘SS’ name. These were real alternatives to the Japanese sports bikes of the time. They were produced in a range of engine sizes (400, 600, 750 and 900) and some of the parts would be seen on one of the real icons of the 1990s: the Ducati Monster, a simple naked machine penned by Miguel Galluzzi, who (according to legend) had his own 888 liquid-cooled machine, stripped of a fairing, which served as inspiration.
Both the 900SS and the Monster showed that this style of bike was popular, but no one realised that Yamaha were working on something that looked like a direct copy of the 900SS. In 1995 Yamaha introduced the TRX850 to the Japanese market and they ‘went Italian’ with a Ducati-style trellis frame.
