Adrenaline Junkies

If there’s anything better than a big powerful bike, it’s a small powerful bike. John Nutting gets out of his comfort zone and onto a pair of Yamaha TZR250 two-stroke V-twins

- John Nutting

Some say that the 250cc two-stroke twins of the late 1980s and 1990s represent the pinnacle of racing machine technology. Fans of these machines rue the day when organisers cut the class from international competition, saying that their combination of light weight, relative simplicity and undiluted power made them the ultimate tool for the track. Being two-strokes, they harked from a less environmentally-conscious era, so unlike modern machines they were not compromised by having to be developed from road bikes. These 250cc racers were the real deal, with the factory-prepared versions offering peak power around 100bhp yet weighing not a lot more than 100kg. They were hard core, and not for the faint-hearted.

The Japanese factories offered batches of less-potent 250cc racers for sale until the MotoGP era, and even produced detuned road-going versions. Notably, Suzuki sold its spectacular RGV250 V-twin in Europe from the late 1980s but with increasingly tough emissions laws the other factories didn’t think it worth the trouble.

But they did sell their 250cc rockets on the home market in Japan and typically jazzed them up every year in updated versions to keep the performance junkies happy. Yamaha was notable in continuing its TZR250 bloodline with the Deltabox Powervalve parallel-twin 2MA models through the 1980s being followed by the reverse-cylinder 3MA in 1989 and then the 3XV V-twin in 1991, which was offered until 1998.