One-Year WONDERBIKE
Thirty years ago in Italy, the early 1990s saw a cutthroat contest for the boy racer buck – OK, lire – among the host of manufacturers enjoying relative prosperity after the boom bike years of the 1980s, despite a brief blip caused by helmets becoming compulsory in 1986. Each competed to attract orders from a pretty fickle customer base with their latest and greatest ring-ding racer, on road, and off. Some smaller ones like Fantic, Malaguti or Ancilotti opted out of the performance race by focusing exclusively on 50/125cc enduros and street scramblers, often with great success. For others the significant size of the race replica sector in a country still passionately enamoured with GP racing led them to develop ever more appealing racers-with-lights. These were updated annually, powered by 125cc single-cylinder two-stroke motors of ever greater performance, which tested to the limit the law allowing 16 year-olds to ride such motorcycles.
This wasn’t exclusively an Italian phenomenon. The Japanese manufacturers couldn’t overlook such a sizeable segment in Europe’s largest market for powered two-wheelers. The result was the development of the Honda NSR125R, Yamaha TZR125 and Suzuki RG125 Gamma, all small scale tributes to those companies’ 500GP racers and bearing the same identical paint schemes. That’s one reason Kawasaki didn’t join in with a 125 Ninja, having renounced two-stroke road racing earlier in the decade in favour of the four-stroke variety, eventually leading to Scott Russell’s World Superbike crown in 1993 with the ZXR 750.
But it was their Italian rivals which really pushed the boat out. By 1991 they offered 125cc road rockets like the Cagiva Mito, Aprilia AF1 Futura and the Gilera SP-02, each capable of ton-up performance with a top speed approaching 170km/h thanks to the nearly 35bhp of their powervalveequipped two-stroke motors, revving to well over 10,000rpm in street-legal guise. Such was the eager appetite for fashion-led variety in the sector that Gilera – owned since 1969 by the Piaggio scooter empire – produced a host of variations on the same theme. Alongside the SP-02, adorned with a colour scheme suspiciously similar to Kevin Schwantz’s Pepsi Suzuki RGV500, there was the less razor-edged KZ/KK sportbike duo with subtly different styling one to another, the MX-1 Endurance with conventional full enclosure bodywork – and the CX125 Monotubo which hit Gilera showrooms in 1991, albeit as a one-year wonderbike completely unlike anything produced up until then –
