For Japan Only: the High-Tech 250s

For Japan Only: The High-Tech 250s

ROUNDUP

NEW-BIKE SALES MAY BE FLAGging elsewhere, but the Japanese home market appears immune. As one official put it, the Big Four’s domestic market seems “incredibly buoyant.”

For proof, just take a look at the Japanese 250cc category. In the U.S., this displacement class receives scarce attention, but in Japan, 250s account for 43 percent of over-50cc sales. Amazingly, this year there are 38 different 250s to choose from in Japan, everything from street-legal MXers to miniature choppers.

The prestige vehicles in the class, though, are the high-performance sportbikes; so much so that each company has a twoand fourstroke example for sale. All eight bikes are light, thanks to an abundance of aluminum, with the twostrokes claimed to weigh-in under 300 pounds. The four-strokes, with their heavier fourcylinder engines, scale about 10 pounds more. Each bike’s engine pumps out 45 horsepower, the agreed-upon limit for 250s in Japan. And all are costly: between $4100 and $4600.

But Yamaha’s TZR250, the class’ current hot bike, illustrates just how much the Japanese 250 buyer is getting for his money. Ostensibly a roadgoing duplicate of the TZR production roadracer, the TZR250 has an aluminum Deltabox frame, a massive, reinforced swingarm and a “reversed” parallel-Twin engine which has its carburetors at the front of the cylinders, allowing the two, expansion-chamber exhausts a straight run from the rear of the cylinders.

Of course, Yamaha doesn’t have a lock on 250-class technology: Both the Suzuki RGV250 and the Honda NSR250R feature very GPlike, V-Twin, twostroke engines. And while Kawaski’s KR-1 looks a little dated next to the other two-strokes, that company’s new ZXR250 four-stroke, with an upside-down fork, appears ready to give Suzuki’s GSX-R250R and Yamaha’s FZR250R-both new for ’89—as well as Honda’s carryover CBR250R, all they can handle.

There’s little chance we in the U.S. will have an opportunity to buy one of these quarter-liter superbikes. We don’t have Japan’s stepped licensing program or its dramatic insurance, tax and inspectioncost breaks for smaller-sized motorcycles. And bringing in 250s— no matter how good—that cost nearly as much as 600s would be sales suicide. As a spokesman for the American branch of one of the companies told Cycle World, “The 250s really are technological wonders. It’s just hard to see how they would fit in here.”

David Edwards