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Hartog was given the bike painted in his trademark
Riemersma livery for the whole of the 1979 season,
with Tom Herron joining Sheene and Parrish in the
Texaco Heron team racing in the UK, while a fifth
bike was confided to Roberto Gallina’s Olio Fiat
NAVA team to race out of Italy.
This machine, like the others, was fitted with a new
exhaust system incorporating longer silencers to
meet the new, lower 105dB noise limits introduced
that year – which presented Suzuki’s engineers
with the problem of how to fit these without them
extending back beyond the rear tyre, illegal under
FIM rules. Solution: curve the expansion chambers
for the rear cylinders initially up, then downwards
around the twin rear shocks, and finally out and
back. The ugly-looking but effective result produced
2kW more via revised porting of the Nikasil cylinders,
so power was now up to 103kW, still at 10,800rpm.
A brake package needed to cope with the XR23B’s
explosive performance was now also fitted,
comprising 310mm twin floating front discs and a
single ventilated 220mm rear.
In this guise the XR23B initially provided Barry
Sheene with a platform to continue his dominance
of the previous year, winning the first three races
of the Transatlantic Trophy before suffering engine
problems in the final two rounds. But as he was
focusing on regaining his 500GP world title from
Kenny Roberts and Yamaha, the only round of the
1979 MCN Superbike series Barry contested was
at Scarborough, where he won both races. Steve
Parrish did a few more and managed fifth place in the
series, but in general the advent of the four-stroke TT
Formula 1 category had removed the UK emphasis
on the 750cc class, and the jumbo-Suzuki saw little
action in Britain. Indeed, the FIM had announced
that this would be the final year for the F750 World
Championship, while paradoxically at the same
time removing the reason for its decline by finally
abandoning the homologation rules.
This allowed the XR23B Suzuki to finally compete
at world level, and its title-winning potential seemed
assured after Virginio Ferrari took the Gallina bike
to victory in the first F750 World Series round at
Mugello in April, following up a week later with a
runaway win at Paul Ricard in the Moto Journal 200.
But the Suzuki factory was more concerned with
regaining its prized 500cc world crown and declined
to support Gallina’s assault on the series, which
thus petered out. Hartog’s third-place finish on the
Riemersma bike at the Assen round was the XR23B’s
final appearance on the international rostrum, and
apart from a solitary race in the hands of Randy
Mamola at the Brands Transatlantic round in 1980,
that was the end of the jumbo-Suzuki project,
leastways at world level.
After the 1979 season, the ex-Hennen bike was
returned to the UK by Hartog, then shipped to the
Malaysian Suzuki importer Guan Hoe where it was
raced for a couple of years before being acquired by
peripatetic German privateer, Gerhard Vogt. He raced
the two-stroke rocketship in the 1982 Macau GP,
where it gave even Wayne Gardner’s works Honda
Britain RS1000 the hurry-up. After that, the XR23B
eventually found its way back to Britain, where it
stayed unused in a private collection until it was
acquired in August 1999 by British enthusiast Chris
Wilson for his collection of works two-stroke racers.SuzukiXR238B“It was a complete triumph
of power over handling,
and I’m glad I survived it”
Below Nigel Everett got
the bike track readyBottom left The flying
commode, The pregnant
duck, the trussed turkey,
the plumber’s nightmare
... these are just some
of the uncomplimentary
nicknames bestowed on
the XR23BBottom right The cubed-
up square four was created
by Suzuki designer Makoto
Hase for the 1977 season