While Ducati cleaned up in superbike racing with Bayliss and Yamaha the year after with Spies, which is better a production version of their winning bikes?
The Yamaha R1 promises to be a genuine breakthrough, making use of a crossplane crankshaft developed in MotoGP to deliver smooth, even power. Will this radical new technology put the R1 ahead of Honda’s awesome current-generation Fireblade?
It’s early 1980 and the threat of the four-stroke invasion hangs heavy in the air. Yamaha and Suzuki have been slugging it out for two years in what may be the final fling for the air-cooled strokers