22 minute read
JAPAN’S FIRST MOTOCROSSER
TM250
TM250 Suzuki Japan’s First Motocrosser Five years before Honda’s 250 Elsinore and Yamaha’s YZ250 came Suzuki’s 1968 TM250 twin-piper: a limited-production example of an actual works machine — Suzuki’s RH67 — and Japan’s very first production motocrosser magine, if you can, the amazing possibility of being able to walk into a dealership back in the day and actually buy a works-spec motocross bike. Not via the AMA’s then-controversial claiming rule, as privateer John Roeder did in early ’79 when he bought Marty Tripes’ $150,000 factory Honda RC250 at Hangtown for $3,500. But actually purchase one, off the showroom floor, and for reasonable money. I BY MITCH BOEHM PHOTOS: JOE BONNELLO
—CHRIS CARTER
It’s hard to conjure such a thing. But back in early 1968 it actually happened, in select Suzuki shops around the country and the world. Suzuki, already on a path to world motocross domination in the 1970s with AMA Motorcycle Hall of Famers Roger DeCoster, the late Joel Robert, and others, built 110 examples of its 1967-spec works motocrosser and sold them as the TM250 during 1968 to mere mortals — and for less than $1,000.
That first TM — Japan’s very first real motocross bike — wasn’t as radical, specialized, expensive or valuable as Suzuki’s ultra-trick works bikes from the ’70s and ’80s. But it was a true, works-spec motorcycle, a rare thing indeed, and a window into the inner workings of a company on the cusp of an amazing championship run.
As the world’s premier collector of Suzuki’s firstgeneration TM250 (also known as the RH67), Motion Pro founder, gold medal ISDT winner and longtime AMA member Chris Carter knows the TM250 story pretty well.
“I lead a blessed life,” Carter told me some years back. “Making a living in the motorcycle industry…being able to ride, collect, restore and be around the machines — and the sport — I’ve loved since I was a kid? It’s amazing, really. And yeah,” he added, “I really enjoy those old Suzukis.”
Carter’s collection is larger and more esoteric than simply these unique grey and blue Suzukis, but you can tell he has a serious soft spot for the limited-edition TM model, of which only half of the 110 that were produced made it Stateside.
The TM250/RH67 production bike (right), flanking the pipey, less-functional and very rare RH68 factory racer. Above: Chris Carter in his man cave.
RH-66
RH-67
RH-68
RH-69
RH-70
“The first TM250 I ever saw,” Carter said, “was in a photo from an early Inter-AM, hanging in a dealership — Dam Cycles — that sponsored AMA Hall of Famer Brad Lackey. I was in high school at the time, and the image imprinted deeply. I thought they were so neat.”
Carter had been riding for a while by then, working his way from Schwinn Sting Rays to Bonanza minibikes and a friend’s twin-pipe Yamaha 100 Scrambler. “My buddy’s dad owned a 305 Scrambler,” he said, “and I rode it, too. I could barely touch the ground, but loved it. I kept riding it on their backyard go-kart track, eventually putting 460 miles on it there! Later, we rode all over the area hills and fire roads, all the way to the beach at Half Moon Bay.”
When he got his license at 15 and had a couple of crashes on the street, Carter went dirt-only, riding some trials on a borrowed Sherpa T and eventually buying — and racing — a Greeves 250. He raced scrambles and dirttrack, began working at a local shop (A&A Motors, which sponsored AMA Hall of Famer Kenny Roberts), and began hanging out with the Jones brothers and other motocross pioneers — including Lackey — while racing the support class at early Trans-AMA events.
ISDT competition followed aboard early Yamaha machinery, as did some success, including a gold medal in Austria in ’76 — “The highlight of my career,” Carter says. He continued to race, but slowly moved toward the business side, working at Rocky Cycle Distributing and eventually launching Motion Pro in ’84. “I’m living the dream,” he says now.
Carter bought his first first-edition TM nearly 30 years ago and hasn’t looked back. “It was missing its exhaust pipes,” Carter remembered, “but I found a pair and made it whole — a great story, by the way. I ended up selling it to my friend and Hall of Famer Tom White in So Cal when I found a larger cache of TM stuff — another great story — but it got me started, and I’ve collected, and kept, several since. I find this motorcycle really interesting — its history, what it ended up becoming, the motocross success it led to for Suzuki, the later yellow TMs and RMs, all of it.”
ROOTS
The genesis of the TM250/RH67 of 1968 can be traced to the mid 1960s and Suzuki’s tentative first steps from an on-road — and roadracing — success story to a fledgling off-road manufacturer. At the time, several ingredients were swirling in the motorcycling stew to
Above: Suzuki’s TM250 engine (right) was in some ways a copy of CZ’s 250 and 360 twin-port engines, which proved fast, tractable and durable in GP competition in the 1960s. Far left: TM/RH progression, from the mid-’60s to the World Championship-winning RH70, with Hall of Famer Joel Robert in the saddle. It didn’t take Suzuki long to become the dominant player in 250cc Grand Prix competition.
make this happen. First, lightweight and fast 2-stroke race bikes were beginning to supplant lumbering 4-strokes in European motocross competition, CZ and Husqvarna best exemplifying the breed.
Also, the Japanese makers were growing by leaps and bounds, especially in the U.S., but with streetbikes and some early twin-cylinder up-pipe scramblers, definitely not purpose-built off-road machines. Some buyers, hoping Japan would build more dirt-worthy machines at some point, settled for these scrambler models, and began riding them in the dirt. They were clearly lessthan-optimal, though for some enthusiasts their high pipes, semi-knobbies, above-average reliability, tons of value and a bit of room between the tires and fenders was better than nothing.
Like other Japanese manufacturers at the time, Suzuki watched all this very closely, and began to seriously consider a more off-road direction. Its first steps were motocross-oriented prototypes, initially a twin-cylinder, T20-derived version in 1964 that proved cumbersome and ill-advised. A year later, Suzuki entered an actual European motocross meeting in Sweden with two bikes — an updated version of that first twin and a lighter and more purpose-built single. The twin was hopeless as a motocrosser, and the single, though lighter and more promising, quit running that day. Still, off-road seeds had been sown.
For 1966, Suzuki dropped the idea of twins altogether and debuted an all-new machine, the twin-pipe, purpose-built RH66, which formed what author Ray Ryan called “the embryo of [Suzuki’s] motocross lineage” in his fine book Motocross Racers: 30 Years of Legendary Dirt Bikes. The RH66 was designed with an eye toward CZ’s highly successful twin-port 236cc
and 360cc motocrossers, which had led the 2-stroke invasion (along with Husky) in the early 1960s; CZ (Ceska Zbrojovka) scored the first-ever moto win by a 2-stroke in the 500cc division in 1963 in Czechoslovakia with Vlastimil Valek aboard, while Joel Robert dominated the 250cc division in ’64 by winning eight GPs on the marque.
Although the RH66 failed to score points or impress anyone on the European GP scene, it did provide Suzuki with valuable testing and feedback, which it put to good use the following year when it introduced the visually and technically evolved RH67 –— the bike that would form the basis for the limited-production TM250/RH67 of 1968.
As in ’66 with the RH66, the evolutionary RH67 didn’t make much of a splash on the international motocross scene. Suzuki sent ex-roadracing champ Kasuo Kobo and newly appointed motocross team manager Mr. Ishikawa back to the European GPs with two bikes and decent support, but mostly what they brought back was information — good to have for future use, but not the sort of get on the map success they’d hoped for.
The problem was twofold. First, Suzuki still lacked the sort of highend rider that could take a mediocre motorcycle and push it toward the front of an international event with equal measures of riding skill and physical fitness. The second problem was the bike itself. Although the best Suzuki motocrosser ever, the RH67 was heavy, some 20-30 pounds heftier than the leading bikes of the day, and not a great handler. Its long-stroke engine made a decent amount of useable power, but the short-wheelbase and poorly suspended RH67 just wasn’t in the hunt performancewise on the GP scene in 1967.
Things got seriously crazy in America in 1968. January’s Tet Offensive. February’s execution of a Viet Cong prisoner by a South Vietnamese General — on TV. March’s My Lai Massacre. April and June’s assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. On and on it went.
Suzuki had its own brand of craziness that year. First, it developed and debuted an entirely new motocross prototype — the RH68; it put its previous-year RH67 works machine into limited production as the 1968 TM250 and sold it through its dealer body; and it hired a Swedish motocross champion by the name of Olle Pettersson to help with motocross development.
You’d assume the RH68 would be an evolutionary take on the RH67. But you’d be wrong, as the RH68 was a serious step backward. It all started with the mostly new engine, which eschewed the long-stroke (66x73mm) design of the previous mill in favor of shortstroke, 70x64mm bore and stroke dimensions. That change, coupled with the move to a new port design (including a single exhaust port instead of dual ports), helped transform what was a flexible, easy-to-use engine with a wide spread of power into a peaky, lightswitchpowerband sort of engine — to one clearly not conducive to rapid laps on slick, tricky and hilly motocross circuits.
“I raced a twin-pipe RH67 during the ’67 season,” said AMA Hall of Famer Preston Petty, legendary So Cal off-road racer and the man synonymous with injection-
molded plastic fenders. “It was okay, but had some serious problems — the crappy fork, weak gearboxes and clutches, broken frames, stuff like that. I won about half the races I entered on it. But the RH68, the singlepiper, was terrible. It had a roadracer’s powerband. First time I rode it, I thought something was wrong! It wouldn’t run below 5,000 rpm, and signed off at 7,000. It was fast, but there was no way to ride it quickly. Suzuki said to me, ‘we’ll send you another one.’ But it was the same; not ridable at all. I remember thinking, ‘I’ll have to completely change it.’ And I did. Changed the cylinder, pipe and carb…Ceriani forks, etc. The thing was better then; it actually worked.”
Suzuki didn’t renew Petty’s contract, but Olle Pettersson was exactly what Suzuki needed to remedy the problem and the program — and quickly. In just a couple of months, Pettersson turned the first-generation RH68 from what he called an “unridable” motorcycle into a far more functional and happier machine. And in a few
more months, he’d turned that improved RH68 into the RH69, a motorcycle that would become, in the space of a year with Belgian Joel Robert aboard, the worldbeating RH70 — a 170-pound, championship-winning motocrosser without equal.
PRODUCTION-LINE MOTOCROSSER
Much like the CZ250 that formed a rough template for Suzuki engineers when they penned the RH66 (which morphed into the RH67), the silver and blue productionized TM250 that appeared in brochures, magazine ads and select Suzuki showrooms in early 1968 was a reasonably simple motorcycle. The heavily gusseted steel-tube frame was of conventional, single-downtube design, splitting into dual tubes just below the exhaust ports. Although the swingarm was of conventional tube steel as well, the frame’s vivid blue paint set the assembly apart visually from everything else on the market.
Suspension was basic; chromed shocks out back and a spindly fork up front that looked suspiciously like the one from Suzuki’s X6 Hustler streetbike. Drum brakes slowed conventionally sized wheels, while an alloy tank and fiberglass fenders — the rear integrating a pair of number plates — tried to keep weight under control. The sandcast engine was basically identical to the works bike’s powerplant — a 249.7cc air-cooled two-stroke featuring long-stroke, undersquare dimensions, 8:1 compression, magneto ignition, a 26mm Mikuni carburetor and a crankshaft-mounted clutch assembly. Twin high-mount exhausts exited on either side of the engine and swept up and rearward, running just below the seat and finishing with a pair of roadracing-type stingers. The engine delivered a claimed 32 horsepower at 6,800 rpm through four speeds. Interestingly, the bike came with a nowstandard left-shift/right-brake setup, but a splined shift shaft exiting on either side of the engine and mirror-image brake controls allowed owners to swap sides if they liked. A spares kit including a cylinder, piston, rings, air-filter and a collection of countershaft sprockets and jets was also included in the $975 asking price. “Suzuki wanted into motocross,” Carter told me. “They played with twins, then went to singles, as they were impressed with the CZ. The unique thing on it was the crank-mounted clutch, so that’s what they did. The high pipes were for ground clearance, but they also copied the airbox and other bits. Some of the parts were super-light, but others were heavy; not sure what their thinking was there. They were just learning about motocross bikes. [The TM] was a perfect example of early Japanese copies of other products — a little awkward, and hard to ride due to the wide dual pipes. Preston’s bike had its pipes trimmed a little so it was narrower. Much of the TM250 is beautiful; the alloy tank, some of the workmanship. But other stuff is cobby.”
If the U.S. motorcycle market cast any uncertainty toward Japan’s first-ever purpose-built motocrosser, it certainly didn’t show up in press reports. Cycle World wrote glowingly of the TM250 in its March 1968 issue, even hauling CZ ace Joel Robert to Saddleback Park to help staffers test the new TM. “Joel could hardly be kept off the Suzuki,” editors wrote. “It was like a completely different machine from the one he’d ridden in Europe,
Hall of Famer (inducted in 1999) and industry giant Preston Petty (8) on the RH68 Suzuki during an Inter-AM event at Saddleback Park in 1968. The bike was fast but peaky and hard to ride, though that didn’t stop Petty from keeping pace out of the gate with Torsten Hallman (1) and John DeSoto (154). Suzuki went back to a longer-stroke engine for 1969 in the RH69, and in 1970 Joel Robert and Sylvain Geboers finished 1-2 in the 250cc World Championship, launching an epic string of GP domination for Suzuki.
AMERICAN MOTORCYCLIST • JANUARY 2022 57 DONALD RAPP
Motion Pro head honcho and AMA member Chris Carter (above right, holding a fender mold) has spent a lot of time, money and elbow grease over the years restoring his TM/ RH collection, sometimes having to replicate parts on his own — thus the fender mold. It’s paid off, as he has what’s probably the finest collection of TMs/RHs in the world.
Joel said [Robert had done some early testing on the RH65 –Ed.], and was a first-class motocrosser.”
“The TM250 is a pure racer,” continued CW, “not a playbike. Anyone who simply wishes to ride around in the desert should leave it well alone. It’s just not for the pleasure rider. This prestige machine will be sold at virtually cost price to serious competitors. Actually, so many things on the bike are hand built that it is difficult to see how Suzuki can make a profit…All things considered,” the staff added, “the TM250 is impressive as a really effective out-and-out race bike.”
Daytona 200 winner and AMA Hall of Famer Don Emde raced a few TMs back in the day and ended up holding onto his TM250/RH67 — and all the spares — through the years. He also kept his very rare and highly desirable RH68, only a few of which ever made it to the U.S. For Chris Carter, a friend of Emde’s and probably the most enthusiastic early RH collector in the world, this was an exceptional opportunity.
“When Don and I began talking about his RHs,” Carter said, “I came down to So Cal and went through everything he had. We ended up working out a deal, and from that cache I was able to put together two twin-port RH67s and, after several years of parts scrounging and careful restoration work, one single-port RH68. It’s an amazing bike. I’ve ridden one of my RH67s around, but the RH68 has never been started. Since that time, I’ve kept my eyes open for any and all RH stuff; I’ve bought and sold several, but keep a nice collection for myself.”
Several years ago, just after buying a very nice unrestored TM250 from a guy in Oregon, Carter discovered that a storage container on his property had been looted — and the TM was gone, along with a Maico and a friend’s CT70 Honda. “I looked everywhere, and for a long time,” he said. “Shows, swap meets, checking the papers and want ads….” Five years went by, until a buddy saw a Craigslist ad — with a clear photo — from a town 80 miles away. “That was almost surely the bike,” said Carter. “The guy selling it — turns out it was a kid
— wanted $150, so he obviously didn’t know what he had. I called a buddy nearby, who staked out the house, and I called the police. Then I headed up there, arriving about the time the kid came home from school or work. I could see the bike in the garage. The police arrived, we verified the VIN to prove it was mine, and I got the bike back. Just in time, too,” Carter added with a grin, “as a squirrel from So Cal — who’d done some questionable deals in LA with friends of mine — arrived just as I was rolling the bike into my van. Turns out he’d offered the kid $2500 for it, so our timing was really fortunate!”
One last story puts much of this TM250 business into perspective. “When I was looking for a set of pipes to finish that first TM250 I bought in the early 1990s,” Carter said, “a buddy of mine in Oregon was standing in a sign-up line at a local motocross. Just in front of him was Pete, a guy from Powroll, who was telling another guy a story about a Greeves he had just bought that somehow had some old TM250 stuff bolted to it — pipes and cylinders. My buddy asked him about it, and I ended up buying the stuff from Pete, all of which helped me finish that first TM250. Who knows if everything would’ve happened the way it had if my buddy hadn’t gone to that motocross event!
“I tell ya,” Carter added with a grin, “I really do lead a blessed life!”
Chris Carter wasn’t able or willing to buy an example of Suzuki’s for-sale works machine back in the day. But he’s certainly made up for it since.
“Those early TM/RH models are very special,” he said. “They’re time machines, really, a direct look into a very cool era in the sport of motocross.”
True words, indeed. AMA
Some of Carter’s bikes were nearbasket cases when he acquired them, and that meant plenty of careful restoration and parts re-creating, such as this rear fender. But the results, as you can see, are sublime, and true time-capsule pieces of motocross history.
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