Half A Century Of Haze!

Suzuki’s GT750 two-stroke triple was the factory’s first real superbike. John Nutting details its origins and rides two examples of a machine with a faithful following.

- John Nutting

With 50 years having passed since Suzuki’s two-stroke GT750 was launched, it’s easy for many motorcycle fans these days to regard the bike as a bit of a dinosaur, a smoking throwback from an era of unbridled and eventually doomed excess.

But at the time, we could hardly believe what we saw in the papers after the T750R, as it was then known, was unveiled at the 17th Tokyo Show in October 1970. In the 1960s, Japanese two-strokes meant performance, but large-capacity two-strokes were just a dream.

Kawasaki was first to translate that into reality with its Mach III in 1969. Despite being 500cc, the Mach III’s almost unbelievable acceleration was more than a match for Honda’s CB750 four, BSA-Triumph’s 750cc triple and Norton’s Commando twin, all four-strokes. Surely then the Suzuki T750R, the first liquid-cooled superbike, would be even more phenomenal.

Top of the range from the Hamamatsu factory had until then been the 500cc Cobra, a bigger version of its air-cooled twins: with an extra cylinder, the T750R offered much more, with speculation that 75bhp would be possible, offering a top speed of more than 125mph. Few technical details were available, and Suzuki wasn’t even confirming that the bike would go into production.

Development continued and later in 1970 Suzuki invited dealers to see it first hand in the US and Europe. After appearing in Germany, the first bike in the UK arrived on Christmas Day 1970 in readiness for January’s Olympia Motorcycle Show. Even then the bike didn’t go on sale outside of Japan in 1971. More improvements were made and the first opportunity for journalists to ride the machine, now called the GT750, was in California at the end of the year.