·R C RJE T. Colin E
AE S
dwards II's Y ahaYZF750
am
·1
By Alan Cathcart
Photos by Kel Edge
16
t was a dream that went sour, a
mission unfulfilled. In 1995, eight
years into the life of the World
Superbike Championship, the party was
finally joined on an official basis by the
second largest motorcycle manufacturer
in th e world: Yamaha . But what happened next wasn't in the script.
Yamaha had put a star cast in plac e
for a three-year min iseries aimed a t
World Superbike supremacy. To achieve
this, the Japanese factory established a
multinational team based at its Italian
Belgarda subsidiary, whose efforts with
a singleton semi-works bike ridden for
many years by Fabrizio Pirovano, then
in '94 by Paolo Casoli, had underlined
how competitive the 20-valve YZF750
could be at the world level. Managed by
the Yamaha Europe HQ in Holland and
coordinated by Belgarda in Italy, the
