Trixie goes native doc
Posted: Tue Jul 17, 2012 11:38 pm
You guys (old farts) have prob all read this but for anyone that hasn't...
http://www.facebook.com/groups/wewantan ... 595730276/
TRIXIE GOES NATIVE
By Alan Cathcart
Things aren't always the way they seem. Exactly 25 years ago, in the days when British parallel-twins like Norton and Triumph ruled the sportbike world, a trio of manufacturers launched their own debut twin-cylinder four-stroke designs, aimed at cutting themselves a slice of what was eventually known as the cafe racer market: Ducati and Moto Guzzi their 750cc 90-degree V-twins, and Yamaha its 650cc parallel-twin XS-1.
Norton of course is no longer with us for the time being, Triumph in born-again mode under John Bloor hasn't yet made anything with fewer than three cylinders - and Ducati and Guzzi have never since built anything other than twins. But Yamaha has also regaled us for the past quarter-century with an array of models that have aroused the interest of twin-cylinder enthusiasts around the world - bikes like the XS650 that was what a British twin should have become but never did, the XV920/TR-1 range of un-Italian V-motors, and most recently the Super Tenere and TDM850 slant-block, 10-valve parallel-twins. Yamaha is the Japanese company that, for all its two-stroke RD350LC heritage, has been most closely wedded to the twin-cylinder four-stroke theme - a policy whose latest manifestation is the TRX850 sports twin launched earlier this year in the Japanese home market. So now Trixie Yamaha has followed her ring-ding sister Elsie onto the two-wheeled design catwalk: Trixie, This Is Your Life.
Considering therefore that Yamaha helped create the modern Twin Supersports motorcycle, it seems a little churlish to accuse them now, as many have done, of jumping on a bandwagon supposedly the exclusive preserve of small-volume European manufacturers. It's equally unjust to infer that, in order to do so, Yamaha simply concocted a Japanese Ducati, by building a slavish copy of a Bologna-made tubular-steel space-frame chassis to house their trademark slant-block motor. Unfair, even if they re-engineered the engine internally to mimic a Ducati's torquey personality by rephasing the crank throw from the two-up, 360-degree, Britbike format of the TDM which the Trixie engine is derived from, to an offbeat 270-degree guise which, anyway you look at it, has the same engine characteristics as a 90-degree V-twin. But this was all done for a purpose, as Stephane Peterhansel's string of African rally victories on his 270-degree works Yamaha twin have proven: The format enabled him to enjoy the same off-road traction on loose surfaces offered by the tuned Ducati 900 engine fitted to the rival Cagiva Elefant, in turn delivering rally-winning Big Bang ridability, now translated to the street.
Unfair? Churlish? Don't believe me? Well, how about listening to Massimo Tamburini, chief design guru of the Cagiva Group and the man responsible for the 900SS Ducati that has allegedly been so plagiarized by the Yamaha TXR850. "People seem to think that the tubular spaceframe is a Ducati trademark," he says, "whereas in fact it was invented by the British on the John Player Norton, and there have been many specialist chassis constructors since then who have used it on every kind of bike - not least Bimota. I do agree it's a European design concept - but you can't accuse Yamaha of being any more derivative for using it on the TRX than we were for employing a Deltabox chassis on the 500 Cagiva GP bike! Anyway, the TRX frame doesn't even resemble the Ducati 900SS, so much as one of Segale's designs - and in fact, I have followed the same composite path with the Cagiva F4 Superbike chassis I just completed, which like the Yamaha uses an upper space-frame combined with a lower aluminum engine mount and swingarm pivot, whereas the Ducati's is in steel!" So there: Perhaps if Yamaha hadn't curiously decided to duplicate the Ducati's red and white color scheme on the J-market Trixie, none of the copycat accusations would ever have been leveled.
There was never really much doubt it would happen, but after a debut year in 1995 when it was sold exclusively in the Japanese home market for which the model was originally conceived, Yamaha has now made the decision to sell their TRX850 sports twin abroad. In making its debut at the Paris Show this September, in revamped guise for the European market, Trixie has gone on her travels, and even if an apparently close vote stopped Yamaha from selling the model in America next year as well, word is that a '97 U.S. launch for the first Japanese bike to be a true competitor to the current breed of European twins is in the cards. However, in coming to Europe, Trixie has also gone native, with a series of detail amendments to the original J-market specification wrought by the development team, headed by Yamaha project engineer Hirosuke Negishi, in the interests of adapting the bike to European riding conditions - as well as a new suit of clothes. Instead of the red and white livery of the J-market model, the TRX850 sold abroad comes either in all black, or metallic blue with a silver frame, with the engine painted silver rather than a sombre black, and the three-spoke wheels a tasteful gray. She looks all the better for it.
As one of the handful of European journalists asked to ride a J-model TRX850 round the windmills of Holland back in freezing February - it was in response to our suggestions that Negishi-san and his crew made the changes they did for Trixie's European launch - I found the chance to compare and contrast the latest Euro version of Yamaha's 270-degree big twin on a 185-mile ride from Spain's craggy Costa Brava up into the foothills of the Pyrenees especially rewarding. I should also declare a further personal interest: Yamaha Europe asked me to ride the only TRX850 racer to be seen outside Japan in 1995 for them, prepared in Japan by Over. Out of a total of eight International BOTT races in Europe this season, we won five of them, finished second and third once each, and DNFed just a solitary time with, of all things, a broken bolt in the gear linkage - after qualifying on pole for the seventh time out of eight starts. Winning major BOTT races ahead of 60-bike fields on GP circuits like Spa-Francorchamps and Assen was a real buzz, as well as proving the significant potential of the TRX for performance tuning - for road or track. Yamaha has concentrated on delivering a sound basic product at contained cost - 6800 pounds in Britain, for example, against 7895 pounds for a Ducati 900SS - on which the owner can then improve the specifications as inclination and budget allow, personalizing the bike to his tastes. By offering not only their own six-speed close-ratio gearbox and racing ignition as a customer option, but also marketing the entire range of Over Racing parts through Yamaha dealers - including camshafts, high-compression pistons, 2-1-2 exhaust system with carbon silencers, 41 mm Keihin flat-sliders, and various chassis parts - Yamaha has made it possible to duplicate my 114 bhp race bike down to the last ultra-competitive detail, without sacrificing the ridability and smooth, torquey power delivery that made my gal Trixie so easy to ride on tight street circuits or in wet conditions.
http://www.facebook.com/groups/wewantan ... 595730276/
TRIXIE GOES NATIVE
By Alan Cathcart
Things aren't always the way they seem. Exactly 25 years ago, in the days when British parallel-twins like Norton and Triumph ruled the sportbike world, a trio of manufacturers launched their own debut twin-cylinder four-stroke designs, aimed at cutting themselves a slice of what was eventually known as the cafe racer market: Ducati and Moto Guzzi their 750cc 90-degree V-twins, and Yamaha its 650cc parallel-twin XS-1.
Norton of course is no longer with us for the time being, Triumph in born-again mode under John Bloor hasn't yet made anything with fewer than three cylinders - and Ducati and Guzzi have never since built anything other than twins. But Yamaha has also regaled us for the past quarter-century with an array of models that have aroused the interest of twin-cylinder enthusiasts around the world - bikes like the XS650 that was what a British twin should have become but never did, the XV920/TR-1 range of un-Italian V-motors, and most recently the Super Tenere and TDM850 slant-block, 10-valve parallel-twins. Yamaha is the Japanese company that, for all its two-stroke RD350LC heritage, has been most closely wedded to the twin-cylinder four-stroke theme - a policy whose latest manifestation is the TRX850 sports twin launched earlier this year in the Japanese home market. So now Trixie Yamaha has followed her ring-ding sister Elsie onto the two-wheeled design catwalk: Trixie, This Is Your Life.
Considering therefore that Yamaha helped create the modern Twin Supersports motorcycle, it seems a little churlish to accuse them now, as many have done, of jumping on a bandwagon supposedly the exclusive preserve of small-volume European manufacturers. It's equally unjust to infer that, in order to do so, Yamaha simply concocted a Japanese Ducati, by building a slavish copy of a Bologna-made tubular-steel space-frame chassis to house their trademark slant-block motor. Unfair, even if they re-engineered the engine internally to mimic a Ducati's torquey personality by rephasing the crank throw from the two-up, 360-degree, Britbike format of the TDM which the Trixie engine is derived from, to an offbeat 270-degree guise which, anyway you look at it, has the same engine characteristics as a 90-degree V-twin. But this was all done for a purpose, as Stephane Peterhansel's string of African rally victories on his 270-degree works Yamaha twin have proven: The format enabled him to enjoy the same off-road traction on loose surfaces offered by the tuned Ducati 900 engine fitted to the rival Cagiva Elefant, in turn delivering rally-winning Big Bang ridability, now translated to the street.
Unfair? Churlish? Don't believe me? Well, how about listening to Massimo Tamburini, chief design guru of the Cagiva Group and the man responsible for the 900SS Ducati that has allegedly been so plagiarized by the Yamaha TXR850. "People seem to think that the tubular spaceframe is a Ducati trademark," he says, "whereas in fact it was invented by the British on the John Player Norton, and there have been many specialist chassis constructors since then who have used it on every kind of bike - not least Bimota. I do agree it's a European design concept - but you can't accuse Yamaha of being any more derivative for using it on the TRX than we were for employing a Deltabox chassis on the 500 Cagiva GP bike! Anyway, the TRX frame doesn't even resemble the Ducati 900SS, so much as one of Segale's designs - and in fact, I have followed the same composite path with the Cagiva F4 Superbike chassis I just completed, which like the Yamaha uses an upper space-frame combined with a lower aluminum engine mount and swingarm pivot, whereas the Ducati's is in steel!" So there: Perhaps if Yamaha hadn't curiously decided to duplicate the Ducati's red and white color scheme on the J-market Trixie, none of the copycat accusations would ever have been leveled.
There was never really much doubt it would happen, but after a debut year in 1995 when it was sold exclusively in the Japanese home market for which the model was originally conceived, Yamaha has now made the decision to sell their TRX850 sports twin abroad. In making its debut at the Paris Show this September, in revamped guise for the European market, Trixie has gone on her travels, and even if an apparently close vote stopped Yamaha from selling the model in America next year as well, word is that a '97 U.S. launch for the first Japanese bike to be a true competitor to the current breed of European twins is in the cards. However, in coming to Europe, Trixie has also gone native, with a series of detail amendments to the original J-market specification wrought by the development team, headed by Yamaha project engineer Hirosuke Negishi, in the interests of adapting the bike to European riding conditions - as well as a new suit of clothes. Instead of the red and white livery of the J-market model, the TRX850 sold abroad comes either in all black, or metallic blue with a silver frame, with the engine painted silver rather than a sombre black, and the three-spoke wheels a tasteful gray. She looks all the better for it.
As one of the handful of European journalists asked to ride a J-model TRX850 round the windmills of Holland back in freezing February - it was in response to our suggestions that Negishi-san and his crew made the changes they did for Trixie's European launch - I found the chance to compare and contrast the latest Euro version of Yamaha's 270-degree big twin on a 185-mile ride from Spain's craggy Costa Brava up into the foothills of the Pyrenees especially rewarding. I should also declare a further personal interest: Yamaha Europe asked me to ride the only TRX850 racer to be seen outside Japan in 1995 for them, prepared in Japan by Over. Out of a total of eight International BOTT races in Europe this season, we won five of them, finished second and third once each, and DNFed just a solitary time with, of all things, a broken bolt in the gear linkage - after qualifying on pole for the seventh time out of eight starts. Winning major BOTT races ahead of 60-bike fields on GP circuits like Spa-Francorchamps and Assen was a real buzz, as well as proving the significant potential of the TRX for performance tuning - for road or track. Yamaha has concentrated on delivering a sound basic product at contained cost - 6800 pounds in Britain, for example, against 7895 pounds for a Ducati 900SS - on which the owner can then improve the specifications as inclination and budget allow, personalizing the bike to his tastes. By offering not only their own six-speed close-ratio gearbox and racing ignition as a customer option, but also marketing the entire range of Over Racing parts through Yamaha dealers - including camshafts, high-compression pistons, 2-1-2 exhaust system with carbon silencers, 41 mm Keihin flat-sliders, and various chassis parts - Yamaha has made it possible to duplicate my 114 bhp race bike down to the last ultra-competitive detail, without sacrificing the ridability and smooth, torquey power delivery that made my gal Trixie so easy to ride on tight street circuits or in wet conditions.