YAMAHA YM1

AS THE YAMAHA ORGANISATION found its feet following tentative exports to the United States of America, it realised that two things substantially aided sales: successful racing results and an active development programme.

Racing at the Catalina GP, a tarmac and dirt event, had brought Yamaha a significantly wider audience. Fumio Itoh may only have come sixth in the 1958 race but he’d also beaten some seriously big names and brands at the same time.

There’s even a newsreel of the event where the narrator makes light of the strange Japanese Y-A-M-A-H-A and its rider: history would show his cynicism was desperately misplaced.

Spurred on by this and other successes, Yamaha had a rolling programme of development which soon saw their two-stroke twins rapidly developing.

Initially based around the German Adler MB250, the firm swiftly took the design to levels of performance few would have credited. The early YDS1 and YDS2 were well received stateside but the pivotal sea change came when the third iteration, the YDS3, arrived on both sides