Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/128138
Yamaha RZV500R By ALAN CATHCART By KOICHI NAKAMURA PHOTOS t's a long way from Okinawa, Japan's most southerly island and the American military's Easternmost outpost, to Cape Canaveral and the NASA Space Shuttle's blast-off base, but for Air Force Major Wyn Belorusky and the quartet of limitededition Yamaha RZV500R two-stroke road rockets he brought home with him, it was a voyage of renaissance when he exchanged sub-tropical Japan for the Florida Space Coast back in May 1994 - after a three-year posting which ended with a goingaway party from the owner of the local wrecking yard. There, he'd become a Saturdaymorning fixture, in the course of repeated raids to keep his squadron of Yamahas ready for action. "I'm a born-again biker courtesy of the US government," proclaims the 20 JANUARY 23. 2002' cue I e 48-year-old veteran, a peace dividend discard given his early retirement papers on a full pension by Uncle Sam in the wake of the Cold War's conclusion, after a 17-year U.S. Air Force career that ended with a posting to Cape Canaveral writing air space plans for Space Shuttle launches. "Instead of getting paid by the Pentagon to shoot rockets into space, Washington gives me the budget to play with the two-wheeled kind on the street - I'd say that was a peace dividend I had to cash in, wouldn't you?" It's hard not to appreciate such an unexpected spin-off of the post-Glasnost era, especially as Wyn's latest weapon is a masterpiece of motorcycle art capable of arousing as much admiration in the parking lot of the local McDonald's, as at the nearby Daytona International Speedway, rather than a megatron missile capable of obliterating half the world's n e _ s population. As such, it is arguably the bike that Yamaha engineers dreamed of building back in 1984 when Japan's first 500cc two-stroke race replica, the RZ/RD500LC, was launched on an unsuspecting public, before being reined in by the massed ranks of accountants reluctant to grant too free an expression in street guise to their company's race engineers' title-winning talents. For as much as the RD500LC was touted during its two years of production in 1984/85 as a Roberts/Lawson racer-with-lights, it wasn't regretfully really that at all. Instead it was Elsie Yamaha on a steroid diet, after a session with the surgeons to double up on dyno power by the simple means of coupling together two liquid-cooled RD250LC parallel twin stroker motors on a common crankcase to create a 50-degree V-four reed-valve sportbike with serious performance potential. Only, by now the era of the mod- ern Superbike was dawning, and bikes like Yamaha's own FZR 1000 and its soon-to-follow FZ750 20valver, let alone the RC30 that would allow Honda to rewrite the rulebook for sporting streetbikes , were almost upon us. So, the RZ/RD500LC, like the NS400 Honda and RG500 Suzuki of similar ilk, instead became a niche-model footnote of Japanese bike evolution. But, in doing so, it also became a cult bike, of which around 8000 units in all were built during the two years of production, according to the International RZ/RD Owners Group which Belorusky helps run. Of these, a bare majority were steel-framed bikes producing a claimed 87 hp at 9500 rpm (in fact 78 hp at the rear wheel) for the European, Canadian and Australasian Retired U.S. Air Force Major Wyn Belorusky owns his very own 500cc Grand Prix racer· or at least a very good facsimile of one.