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The Yamaha MotoGP bike you never knew existed

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toratora
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The Yamaha MotoGP bike you never knew existed

Post by toratora » Tue Dec 12, 2017 6:07 pm

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https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/opin ... ew-existed
Mat Oxley wrote:12th December 2017

Yamaha has won plenty of MotoGP titles since the four-strokes arrived 16 years ago, but the factory had a miserable time in the final years of the 500cc World Championship. Yamaha was defeated nine years in a row, mostly by Honda, which is why its engineers built an all-new bike for the final 2001 season of 500s, when Honda and Valentino Rossi would be their greatest rivals.

This bike was tested in Europe in the summer of 2000 by Marlboro Yamaha riders Max Biaggi and Carlos Checa, less than 18 months before the final 500 GP, but never raced. And somehow, Yamaha managed to keep the project secret. Until now.

Yamaha engineers were so desperate to win again that they cribbed the bike’s most vital performance feature from Honda’s NSR500, winner of seven of the last nine 500 championships.
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