Yamaha RD350
YAMAHA PROBABLY DIDN’T have an inkling of what it had started at the end of the 1960s when it began drafting plans for a new range of two-stroke twins. 1967 had seen the company launch its first horizontally split crankcase twin with the 350 YR1. So successful was the bike that it formed the basis for the famous TR350 race bikes, campaigned so triumphantly by the likes of Saarinen, Gould, Duff and countless others.
Yet the 250 road bike, the YDS6, still ran a vertically split case motor that was both costly to build and difficult to assemble. For the 1970 model year the company launched two brand new sports twins; the YDS7 250 and the YR5 350. Unknowingly, Yamaha had just catalysed a chain of events that would see it using directly related, parallel and analogous blueprints for class-leading machines almost to the end of the 20th century. With the addition of a disc brake and an apparently inconsequential inlet tract upgrade, subsequently Yamaha unleashed one of its most devastating weapons; the RD350.
“In essence the RD350 and its smaller 250cc brother represented the collective and distilled wisdom Yamaha had accumulated from every aspect of motorsport”
THE BIKE
In essence the RD350 and its smaller 250cc brother represented the collective and distilled wisdom Yamaha had accumulated from every aspect of motorsport. Frame design and engine technology were taken straight from the track and subtly tweaked for general road use. The chassis of the RD250/350 was a cost-effective commercial version of the frames that had been raced around innumerable road circuits, while the engine owed a lot to the earliest purpose-made scramblers or motocrossers. Revised porting saw an additional pair of ports squeezed into the RD’s cylinders – making a total of seven. Yamaha combined this innovation with something so clever, yet so simple that at launch, the RD250/350 motors made everything else obsolete overnight.
The YDS7 and YR5 had been potent machines in their own right,
