MotoGP 2008 - Yamaha GP History

51 years after Yamaha Motor Company was established by parent company Nippon Gakki on July 1st 1955 and Yamaha’s first motorcycle, the YA1, won its debut in the Mount Fuji Ascent Race, racing still remains a key part of the Yamaha heritage. Yamaha today competes in all fields of two-wheeled motorsport, at both international and national levels worldwide and MotoGP remains the pinnacle of its racing activities.

Yamaha Motor Company first entered the international racing field in May 1961, after achieving dominance in the Japanese domestic racing scene. With the 125cc RA41 and the 250cc RD48, Yamaha was eighth on its debut in both categories. After taking a year out for development in 1962, Yamaha returned in 1963 with a new 250 bike, the RD36. The Factory’s first victory quickly followed in the fifth race of the season at Spa, when Fumio Ito led home a Yamaha one-two.

In 1964 Briton Phil Read spearheaded Yamaha’s challenge and won five races on the RD56, taking the 250cc Riders’ crown, as well as helping Yamaha to its first Manufacturers’ title, repeating the result in 1965. Yamaha’s 125 and 250 riders continued to flourish through the late 1960s, with Read and Bill Ivy sharing glory with the RA31 and RD05. Ivy took the 125 crown in 1967 and Read achieved double glory in both classes in 1968. In all Yamaha has taken 14 250cc Riders’ and Manufacturers’ titles, the most recent title with Frenchman Olivier Jacque in 2000.

Yamaha then took a few years out of the championship to focus on developing a 500cc bike and emerged victoriously into the premier-class category in 1973, Jarno Saarinen of Finland and the 80bhp YZR-500 winning their very first race together. The YZR, featuring the same style of inline-four engine that Yamaha still uses on its YZR-M1 today, quickly became the dominant force in the class and Yamaha became the first Japanese marque to win the 500cc Manufacturers’ Championship in 1974.

After Saarinen was tragically killed in a 350 race in May 1973, Yamaha withdrew for the remainder of the season in order to regroup and prepare for 1974, for which they employed the legendary Giacomo Agostini. In their first season together Yamaha and the charismatic Italian won just two GPs, but in 1975 they won four races and took the Riders’ Championship. It was Agostini’s last, but for Yamaha the first of many.

Yamaha’s next world champion was American Kenny Roberts, who changed the face of racing with his radical ‘dirt-track’ style. Silencing critics who thought it would take him several years to adapt to European circuits, Roberts was successful from the outset and won the title in 1978, 1979 and 1980. He won 12 GPs over his three-year reign and a further ten over the next three seasons.

A few years later ‘Steady Eddie’ Lawson emerged as Yamaha’s new title contender, taking the title in 1984, his second year as a Yamaha rider, then again in 1986 and 1988. In his first five seasons he won a total of 26 races, as well as working with the factory on some of the most important technical developments in the life-span of the YZR-500; by 1988 the Yamaha was giving out more than 150bhp. Yamaha won a hat-trick of Manufacturers’ titles from 1986-1988 and also leased bikes to many privateer teams; in 1988 five out of the six top men in the championship were Yamaha-mounted!

Wayne Rainey was the third of Yamaha’s American greats to take a hat-trick of titles, during what was arguably one of the Grand Prix racing’s most competitive periods in the early 1990s. Steered by Kenny Roberts’ Factory Team, Rainey won the title for three straight years from ‘90-’92 against such great names as Doohan, Schwantz, Lawson, Gardner and Kocinski. Rainey spent his entire GP career with Yamaha and won 24 races from 1988-93, before moving into management and running Yamaha’s Factory Team effort for several years.

Rainey’s were Yamaha’s last Rider Championships in the 500cc class, although the Factory came second with Italian Max Biaggi in 2001, the final year of the class. With the arrival of the new four-stroke MotoGP category Yamaha bid a fond farewell to its YZR-500 and introduced its new challenger, the YZR-M1, on which Biaggi was also second in 2002.

In 2004 reigning World Champion Valentino Rossi joined Yamaha and stunned the racing world by winning the season-opening Grand Prix in South Africa, just over three months after he first sat on the bike. He went on to win nine out of 16 races and Yamaha’s first World Championship for 16 years. Along with team-mate Carlos Checa, the Yamaha Factory Racing Team also took the Teams’ title. In 2005 Rossi dominated even more, taking eleven victories and only finishing off the podium once in the 17-race season. With new team-mate, American Colin Edwards, the Factory Team once again won the Teams’ title and Yamaha the Manufacturers’ title, completing a perfect hat-trick in the year of Yamaha’s 50th Anniversary.

2006 was less successful for Yamaha, with Valentino Rossi surrendering the title he had made his own over the last five seasons in a last-race showdown in Valencia. The irrepressible Italian however still took more victories than any other rider and stood on the podium ten times. 2007, the first year of the new 800cc era, was another difficult year for Yamaha. Rossi won four races but missed out on second place in the championship by one point, after suffering injury in practice for the final race. The end of 2007 saw Edwards moving on after three years as Rossi’s factory team-mate, with Rossi due to partner Spanish 250cc World Champion Jorge Lorenzo in 2008.