Apache hunter!: Project Suzuki TS400 part 2

All you never wanted to know about Suzuki TS400 and more! And knowing Scoop, probably some you didn’t… hee hee!

- STEVE COOPER

OK, so mentally I’ve made the commitment to buying a Suzuki TS400 circa 1972-1977. In amongst that handful of years the bike changed quite significantly, moving from full-on prototrail iron – sold as the fastest dirt bike you could ride on the road – through to a machine which had off-road aspirations that few owners ever bothered to realise.

The truth is that the TS400 Apache never really cut it as a real trail bike, which is fine by me as I’ll be sticking to the Tarmac like a summer bug to a fork leg. Where the TS250 actually had some genuine off-road potential, its bigger brother struggled on the mucky stuff. Too much weight and too much power combined with a chassis that wasn’t wholly dirt orientated meant dry fire trails in American forests were about the bike’s limit… providing there wasn’t too much in the way of loose dust.

One of my New Zealand contacts tells me that the Apaches were infamous when used on beaches for literally digging themselves into massive holes. For reasons no one can clarify, Suzuki’s R&D team bestowed the earliest models with a 19-inch front wheel, which seems a little odd until you look at what the firm believed they were up against. Japan had been selling street scramblers into America for almost a decade and most had 18 or 19-inch rims, and this is the route most of the major players blindly followed until specialist dirt riders steered them towards proper 21-inch front hoops.