Recently, I was shooting with Dave Hatch for his TSN Motorcycle Experience show, visiting with an Irish enthusiast and bike collector in central Ontario. I had met this individual via my long-time friend and tuner from my racing days, Bill Mathison. We went to see a selection of Suzuki two-strokes, including a perfect GT750 triple “water buffalo.”
When I first arrived at this guy’s garage, I saw that he had two Gammas, a very nice 1985 in the famed blue race colors (stock) and an updated gray market Japanese 500 that he had built out as a 500. I spied an RZ in the back of the shop on a lift and made a wise ass crack about “collecting the whole set” – all he needed was a “popcorn maker,” Honda’s jewel-like NS400R triple.
Turns out he had collected the whole set!
To be in the company of these key machines 40 years after I use to work with them almost every day, all summer, was a real delight – especially since they would start and run! Both Hatch and I had Gammas “back in the day,” and gravitated to the bike we best remembered.
But others on hand were impressed by the more flamboyantly presented Honda and especially the Yamaha. When new, the Yamaha did the best job of looking like the MotoGP machine it was supposedly based on; but the Suzuki was, in detail, much closer to race spec.
The “base model” RZ500 arrived in Canada with much fanfare in early 1984, just after the start of the race season, and the first bike raced complete with stock tires in Sanair, Quebec, the day after it arrived by rail and was uncrated in the paddock. Word of the RZ had circulated for the previous year, and many enthusiasts and especially racers (including me) put down a deposit on the V-4, sight unseen.
The bike proved problematic on track but certainly attracted lots of attention. And it was fast! The RZ-R in these photos in the exceedingly rare Japanese version with a true alloy frame, a mod that dropped the weight and helped improve the results of the RZ – at tracks where it was legal.
At the time in the US, the local bike industry was protected by tariffs, and most of the Japanese sports machines were offered there as 700s, not the typical 750. The Japanese didn’t bother with the trick two-strokes for the US – none of the trio pictured together were ever legal street machines south of the border.
At the time of the arrival of these crazy two-stroke designs, this spec of engine was going out of favor, and noise and emissions would restrict sale for good in the very near future. The last sporting two-stroke sold in the US was Yamaha’s handsome RZ350 “Roberts Replica,” complete with heavy and ugly catalytic converters in the exhausts. Canada got the RZ in bulk, but not the gigantic exhausts and sadly no Roberts replica, either.
The initial list price for the RZ500 was $ 5,000, but soon word got out that Suzuki’s own four cylinder, the square Gamma (much closer to the Grand Prix racer’s spec than the RZ), would arrive sometime in 1995. One RG did the Canuck show tour that winter, but insiders explained it was not a runner, and no actual street version appeared until June of 1985, much like the RZ the year before – again, people were assembling brand new bikes in the paddock and heading straight onto the circuit.
By early 1985, the program for the Shannonville races suggested a RZ500 retail price of $ 4,099 from Royal City Cycle in Guelph. They would also sell you a Lightweight class dominant RZ350 two-stroke twin for $2,699.
Meanwhile, real world offerings were stealing most of the attention, at least early in the year. Suzuki had their brand new, era establishing GSX-R750, a race bike on the street, with focus on light weight for the oil-cooled, alloy framed design. Meanwhile, Yamaha had a five-valve cylinder head on their new beam (steel) frame FZ750.
In media comparisons, the two bikes received similar rankings, even though they approached performance from two different angles. On track, the Suzuki was dominant, although tariff concerns meant that the GSX-R arrived in Canada a year earlier than for the Americans.
When Kevin Schwantz first went to the U.K. for the Match Races in 1986, the organizers borrowed a virtually stock street Gixxer from a U.K. dealer for the budding star to race against Honda’s Fred Merkel. Suzuki Canada’s Mike Crompton helped the works US Yoshimura squad with parts and set-up info in the early GSX-R days and tuned for Miguel Duhamel when the rising star rode for the Yosh squad.
The most unobtanium of the homologation specials of this era was the Walter Wolf Suzuki Gamma, built in the striking dark colors of the Slovenian oil baron, recently moved to Canada. Wolf had just taken over the Williams Formula One team and won a few big races including the Canadian Grand Prix at Mosport. An early adopter of “pull through” marketing, Wolf also spun off a variety of products, including toiletries, apparently popular in Japan and Europe.
This allowed for the Suzuki Japan tie-in, and Wolf supported two racers in Canada, complete with Japanese leathers and related gear. Mario Duhamel got the eastern Canada deal and won the Championship, even if his bike did look decidedly second hand by the end of the season.
Following success in 1986 at the Sanair National, Duhamel’s Wolf Suzuki was protested, and the engine removed and taken to Ontario Honda in Toronto, to be measured by the late Rick Andrews, the head tech in that shop. Andrews was well liked at the track and considered non-partisan, and Honda were not big players in Production at the time – soon they would be.
Square-four inspection revealed a perfectly set up two-stroke, with rods of matching size and weight, identical rotary valves, matching cylinder heads, and the like. Duhamel’s Gamma was quick, but legally so – but most racers did not have access to parts bins in Japan to ensure the accuracy of the spec and set-up of the engine.
Later, the “homologation special” era would be super charged with the development of the World Superbike class and the Japanese commitment to building exotic Ducati twin beating machinery. The most famous of these collectable machines was the V-4 Honda RC30, a machine Honda were worried no one would buy – but they eventually decided on another production run!
At close to $20,000 in Canadian funds in the late 1980s, the RC30 was a common sight at Canadian tracks, but again exceedingly rare in the US, where it was a “special order” from dealers late in the production run. It was legal in time for Miguel Duhamel to win the Daytona 200 on a Camel Honda in 1991.
Suzuki offered various limited edition GSX-Rs, including backing up by one engine spec “generation” from the twin-pipe “J” model “slingshot” to the RR homologation version in 1988. (Anyone remember the Boutique Suzukis of Gary Goodfellow and Michel Mercier?) Yamaha updated the FZ to the alloy framed FZR and then delivered the knockout 0W-01 750 proto-racer; a machine Steve Crevier took to the Canadian National title against a field of mostly limited-edition entries in 1989.
But that’s another story.
