When the first MotoGP rules were first announced, Suzuki and Yamaha went away and pretty much shoehorned 990cc four-stroke engines into revised 500 chassis, while Honda started all over.
The result was the RC211V, arguably the greatest GP bike of all time, with an ingenious engine configuration at its heart.
“Soon these bikes will become legends,” said Valentino Rossi at the end of the five-year reign of the first big-bore MotoGP bikes, the wild 990cc four-strokes that arrived in 2002 and were foolishly replaced by the hated, peaky 800s in 2007.
Many MotoGP paddock insiders and fans still remember the 990 years as a golden moment of motorcycle excitement. You could argue that although the era started in 2002 it only really got going the following year, when Ducati’s mind-bogglingly fast Desmosedici joined Honda’s sublime RC211V, Aprilia’s bonkers RS3 Cube, Yamaha’s initially underwhelming YZR-M1, Suzuki’s problematic GSV-R and Kawasaki’s short-lived Ninja ZX-RR on the grid.
The first MotoGP rules were written to encourage technical diversity, so triples were allowed to be lighter than fours and
