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/656086
VOL. 53 ISSUE 11 MARCH 22, 2016 P105 1990s Yamaha's racing colors had shifted to blue, but in 2005, in celebration of its 50th anniversary, the U.S. Factory Yamaha road race team's raced with what they called "old-school" yellow and black color schemes carrying the traditional black and white "Yamaha strobe" graphics during the AMA road races at Laguna Seca. As a further nod to the past, the designer of the original paint scheme, Sanders, was enlisted to paint the new race ma- chines. The Yamaha factory racing colors from the past is indelibly associated with road racing and dirt track legends from the 1970s like Kenny Roberts, Kel Carruthers, and Eddie Lawson. Keith McCarty, Yamaha racing manager, said during those anniver- sary festivities that the colors brought back a lot of memories. "I've seen a lot of guys win championships with wearing the 'bumblebee' colors both road racers and motocrossers. It will be fun to see Aaron Gob- ert, Damon Buckmaster and Jason DiSalvo on the line in yellow and black." Perhaps the oldest association between colors and a motorcycle manufacturer goes back more than a century and comes from the American manu- facturer Harley-Davidson. Harley's iconic bar and shield first appeared in 1910 using orange and black colors. However the exact origin why black and orange were used is unknown. Some speculate the orange represented fire that would sometimes belch out of the exhaust pipes of the racing machines. Regardless of the reason, no other manufacturer has made as much of its corporate colors as the Milwaukee maker. Go to any bike rally or AMA Grand National dirt track race and you'll see an ocean of black and orange colored shirts and hats. Today nearly as closely associated to a color as Harley-Davidson is the red of Honda. In motorcycling if you see red you think Honda. Honda even features advertising, which implores motorcyclists to "Ride Red." Some of the early Honda Elsinore motocross bikes even had red engines. It's often overlooked that for years Honda riders sported a tri-color design. If you look at photos of Honda's American motocross team in the early 1970s sported red, blue and white riding gear. That theme carried over to the company's famous endurance racers of the mid-to-late 1970s and later to its GP machines of the early 1980s. Freddie Spencer's Honda NS500 sported the red, white and blue paint scheme en route to the 1983 FIM 500cc Grand Prix World Championship. Cycle News editor Kit Palmer points out that a unifying racing colors for motorcycle maker is a fairly recent practice. "For years racing livery would be different in Europe from what it would be in America," Palmer explains. "At one time Yamaha was yellow and black here in America but red and white in World Championship motocross, and we thought they were so cool and had to have them! Eventually, we got white and red YZs, for a while, before Yamaha went corporate blue. I remember KTMs being red, then white before settling on orange. Maybe up through the 1980s and even maybe into the '90s it was like that until a lot of the factories started mak- ing a point about unifying their color schemes." With increased commercialization of motorcycle racing in the 1980s and '90s often the corporate colors of a manufacturer takes a back seat to the colors of sponsors. Honda's MotoGP bikes run the colors of its sponsor Repsol. Before that Yamaha's GP machines had the highly visible day-glow red and white of Marlboro. At one time Camel-spon- sored Honda GP machines ridden by the great Valentino Rossi were a unique yellow and blue. Fueled by a passion for racing, red Ducati motorcycles can be found competing in MotoGP and Superbike races throughout the world. Ducati makes no bones about it; the Italian maker wants to be identified as "Ferraris on two wheels." For a time Ducati even sported on their side panels a horse identical to that of the Ferrari emblem. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives