Back in the late ‘seventies,the band Mental As Anything
had a big hit with “The Nips are Getting Bigger’, which was about
Scotch Whisky, not motorcycles. But with a little imagination, it
could have applied to a trend emanating from Nippon itself,
specifically Hamamatsu and Tokyo, where first Honda, and later
Suzuki and Yamaha, were steadily evolving a new breed of four
stroke singles. Singles that did not leak oil, started reasonably
easily, and even sounded right. By 1972 these models included
the ground-breaking four-valve Honda XL250 and a year later, the
rocker-arm breaking XL350, leaving Yamaha with but one choice
if it were to steal a march on the opposition – a 500 single.
That single was the TT500C, first displayed at a dealers’
convention in September 1975. Now this was a quantum leap –
backwards. Back to the days of the big, bad old British singles, in as
much as the TT500 was not a small or mid-sized buzz-box, but a
full-on 500 single with internal dimensions that could have come
straight from Birmingham. A real thumper. True, the new Yamaha
was strictly an off-roader, and in most markets, such as Australia,
could not (legally) be registered for road use, although quite a few
subsequently managed to get around this. But it was a beauty,
make no mistake; a free-spinning engine with heaps of torque,➢
58 :OLD BIKE AUSTRALASIA
BORN IN
StoryJim Scaysbrok PhotosOBA archives, Brendan vandeZand, Nick Shaw, Phil Vergison.
YAMAHA SR500
NORTH SYDNEY
Yamaha factory rendition
of the new-for ’78 SR500.