‘THE WORST BIKE YAMAHA EVER BUILT. THEY BLEW UP LIKE HAND GRENADES’
Vibration is the enemy of just about everything that makes motorcycling fun. It’s uncomfortable, breaks parts, turns oil into a foam bath and saps power. Nowadays there are more bikes built with a balance shaft or counterbalancer than those without – certainly over 250cc, anyway. Yet it was only 50 years ago that the first motorcycle ever fitted with one reached the global marketplace, in the form of the Yamaha TX750 parallel-twin – the Japanese idea of what a traditional British engine with a 360° crank ought to have become, but never did. Until then, vibration was something riders just had to put up with.
Only the most dogmatic fan of any of the other big four J-marques would dispute the notion that Yamaha has always been the most innovative and daring Japanese manufacturer. From leftfield models that became legends, like the DT-1 street enduro, or the RD250/350LC ring-ding race replicas, the V-Max, even the TMAX maxi-scoot. The house of the tuning forks has a proven track record of ingeniously creating new market trends with cleverly targeted products.
Sometimes Yamaha’s wilder R&D bets didn’t pay off, as the unloved V4 cruiser, the expensive XZ550 and the gauche-looking hub-centre GTS1000 all proved only too well. But they failed because they didn’t thrill customers enough to make them whip out their wallets, whereas the Yamaha TX750 was that rare thing: an apparent category-topper which turned out to be a mechanical catastrophe.
The weird thing is, it only came about because Yamaha played the conservative card at a
