Cycle News

CN III ARCHIVES BY SCOTT ROUSSEAU L egend has it that the Suzuki TM400 Cyclone remains the worst dirt bike ever pawned off on the public. First produced in 1971, the Hamamatsu-based company's initial consumer foray into the Open Class motocross category is remembered as being comprised of the most frighteningly powerful engine ever devised wrapped in a chassis too weak to hold up a hammock. Believe the hype, and you'd swear that the deserts and motocross tracks of America are still littered with the bones of those unfortunate enough to cross paths with a TM400 and attempt to tame it. But at least one man remembers them a bit differently. As a factory Suzuki racer in the early 1970s, Rich Thorwaldson recalls that the TM400 was a pretty decent bike, once a few of its various handling and power is- sues were addressed properly. "I actually had pretty good luck with them," Thorwaldson recalls. "Given another halfa year [of devel- opment], they actually were a pretty good motorcycle." Thorwaldson vividly remembers the first time that he ever rode a production TM400. "It was at Saddleback Park, and it was myself and Russ Darnell," Thor- waldson says. "We both tested them at the same time. It had virtually no flywheels, and it had that T-shaped crankcase, so it revved like a 125cc road racer—from idle to wide open P106 RICH THORWALDSON: THOR VS. THE CYCLONE of this thing that I thought, 'Shit, I've got to ride this thing. I'll deal with the handling later.' They [Suzuki] gave me three of them to run with for that first year. Those were just the production versions. Then, when I went motocrossing, I got a lot more factory support and special parts." But Thorwaldson also did much of his own backyard R&D as well, and the case could easily be made that it was he—and not the factory— who made the biggest strides in the TM400's development cycle. A rider undoubtedly cast in the mold of the legendary Dick Mann, Thor- waldson's greatest talent may have been not in his riding prowess but more in his ability to apply practical solutions to the seemingly complex engineering problems of the TM. To him, the Japanese-made bike was no different from the British- and European-engineered dirt machines immediately. Every time that the front end got airborne or the rear wheel got light, it would just light up. The thing had no tractability whatsoever, and with the handling it would pitch you sideways so quickly." Most people, including the enthu- siast motorcycle press corps, swung legs over stock TM400s, only to come back shivering and confused from the experience—if they came back at all—but Thorwaldson has never been most people, and he saw an opportunity to develop the bikes into winners. In fact, he won the first race he ever rode aboard a stock TM400. "Suzuki was ecstatic when I won, but even then, I knew that I had a lot of work cut out for me to make the thing work right," Thorwaldson remembers. "A lot of people just shied away from it, but I was just so Impressed with the absolute power The evil Suzuki TM400

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