THE SCREAMIN’ YELLOW BANSHEE

1975 The Screamin’ Yellow Banshee

46 years ago, advanced suspension and a DeCoster-esque look made Suzuki’s very first RM — the ’75 RM125M — a winner in the showroom and on the track

By Mitch Boehm

“Holy $*&%#!!” was right. The Suzuki RM125 ad that appeared in various moto magazines in early 1975 freaked people out, me included. Here was a 125-class motocrosser that looked like a works bike, nevermind that it was in many ways a reworked TM125 Challenger with laiddown shocks.

But what an image those beefy Kayabas made, all trick-looking and angled so far forward the side panels had huge bulges in them. The RM looked like a 4/5ths-scale version of what DeCoster, Wolsink and DiStefano were riding, and I remember thinking that here, truly, was a bike that had a chance to put a serious dent into the 125 Elsinore’s domination of 125cc motocross — not an easy task given the silver Honda’s performance.

While Suzuki’s works machines were then the best in the world (Joel Robert’s exotic 1972 RH72 racer, for instance, weighed just 168 pounds!), its production-spec TM125s, 250s and 400s were woefully outgunned, especially once the Elsinores appeared.

Everything changed with the introduction of the RM, which offered bold technical advances over its TM125 sibling and set the stage for a line of all-new RMs that would appear in 1976 and beyond. It offered a hopped-up engine with a heavier-breathing cylinder and transfers, a new pipe and a larger carburetor; and on the chassis side a beefier TM250/400 fork and those laid-down Kayabas, which offered 7.5 inches of travel — a lot for that era. Long travel was leading edge in 1975; kits were available to modify the suspension of existing bikes, and sold like crazy. But Suzuki had done it for you.

It all worked, at least reasonably so. Cycle and Cycle World pegged RM125M testbikes at 18.5 and 19.6 hp, respectively, a couple ponies down on the YZ125C and CR125. But when you factored in the available hop-up kit from Suzuki (and the aftermarket) and its better suspension performance, the yellow zonker was right in the ballpark.

Suddenly, Suzuki had gone from alsoran to contender. And within a year, the company would stun again with the casereed-inducted, chromoly-framed RM125A, along with highly functional RM250 and 370. Talk about DeCoster-esque…