All-New Yamaha Sportbike?

ALL-NEW YAMAHA SPORTBIKE?

ROUNDUP

MOTORCYCLES HAVE TO start somewhere, and usually that somewhere is the imagination of a designer. He devises a concept, and if corporate brass likes the concept, the bike is built as a one-off showbike.

The enthusiast public usually doesn’t get to see concept bikes before they receive the corporate thumbs-up, and that’s why news of this bike, presented in the Italian magazine Moto Sprint as the Yamaha FR-Z900, is so surprising.

The bike, attributed to a designer named Uchida, apparently is tentatively scheduled to be shown at the Tokyo Motor Show in October. Moto Sprint says this is not merely a dream bike intended to attract the curious; rather, it says, it is a real design proposal that may make it into production.

If so, that production is a ways away, at least in part because of the complexity of the machine. Based around a carbon-fiber frame and rolling on front-and-rear single-sidedswingarm suspension, the bike reportedly will offer twowheel drive. Apparently two drive methods are under consideration: chains to both wheels, and hydraulic drive to both wheels. Experimentation indicates that the hydraulic system-particularly for the front wheel-is much easier to build than a chain-drive arrangement, but is much less efficient. If chains are chosen, according to Moto Sprint, all of them would run in enclosed oil-bath containers.

Power would be delivered by a 900cc Genesis-style 20valve engine that uses electronic fuel injection and two injectors per cylinder, though an original version of the bike apparently was conceived to use carburetors.

The big question, of course, is whether this project is real, or whether it is a pipe dream resulting from some designer’s overheated imagination. The Tokyo Motor Show will be show-and-tell time.

Jon F. Thompson