Project Steve Parrish Yamaha YDS3 Part 1 First Love!

Former British bike champ, world truck driving champ, commentator and full-time comedian Steve ‘Stavros’ Parrish buys his first love…

- Steve Parrish

I’ve wanted one of these for10 years... why? Well, it was the first road-legal bike I had in my youth.

Now, I did have other bikes, but this was my first road bike. You see, I was always being chased by coppers across fields on various bikes, but they could never catch me. The one time they did was when I went across a field and a bumpy road in an Austin 16. The car was being thrown around that much the bonnet flew off, hence I got nabbed. I was fourteen-and-a-half at the time…

By 15 I had a tractor licence, which made me very popular with my mates. Basically, I would put them all in the front loader and charge them all two bob for a lift to the youth club at Bassingbourn. Those two bob fares helped me save for my first road bike – the YDS3. To buy the thing, it was around £400 if memory serves, I also had a loan from my mum of around £200. So it was pricey and this wasn’t even new! I bought it in 1969, so it must have been two to three years old as they came out in around 1965/66. Either that or I’m making it up as I’m old and my memory isn’t what it was.

Either way, I had a Jap bike while all my mates had James Captains or Ariel Arrows. I never got any stick from them as they couldn’t keep up with me. Also, they soon got bored of being by the side of the road trying to sort out their British bikes, so it was never a shock to me why Honda’s CB750 became so popular. Mind you, saying that, the auto-lube system on the YDS3 wasn’t that brilliant and it used to seize when I was flat out!