| November 3, 2024
Cycle News Archives
COLUMN
The Champion That Wasn’t
By Kent Taylor
To begin with, the Suzuki TM400 motocrosser of the early 1970s was not a great motorcycle. That much is known. The bike’s foul handling traits became downright evil when its schizophrenic powerband came alive, transforming it into the Mr. Hyde of motocross machines. This was a race bike that, in the wrong hands, was likely going to get somebody hurt. Suzuki’s marketing team unwittingly helped the bike attain its bad rep when, likely after a few highballs, they came up with an ill-conceived name for the bike: the Cyclone. An uncontrollable, violent act of nature, twisting and spinning as it pleases, causing destruction and death as it lays down a trail of terror—at your local Suzuki dealer now!
The tale of the Suzuki TM400 is legendary, but it’s not a good one. What about one of the two brothers of the 400s, the TM250?
A bad reputation, however, seems to have the power to increase exponentially, and the TM400 has likely received more negative vibes than it really deserves. Before he was a Team Suzuki racer, MX star Billy Grossi actually had good success aboard a TM400.
“In 1972, I was working at a Suzuki dealership here in Santa Cruz,” Grossi remembers. “I raced a TM400 several times locally and did quite well on it!”
While acknowledging that the bike “was a straight line machine, with a light switch powerband” he added that “it never threw me off or intimidated me. I would get the holeshot and never look back.”
The TM400 wasn’t the only Suzuki getting a good beatdown from the powerful motorcycle media. In their August 14th, 1973 issue, Cycle News gave us the lowdown on the middle brother of the TM lineup, the TM250 Champion. A few sentences into the story, the reader quickly gets the impression that the staffers would have rather spent the day sampling experimental IBS medications.
The team went straight for the heart early in the test. “The motor,” they wrote, “like its 400cc relative, has an insignificant amount of flywheel effect. A full throttle twist will result in little more than flying dirt. Toy with the throttle for a few seconds and finally some power gets to the ground.”
Unfortunately, that good feeling didn’t last long. “Then, shift from first to second and gas it. No go, just wheelspin.”
The TM250 seemed to disappoint the test crew with every foot that it moved down the track. The Suzuki was an unreliable shifter, especially for riders with larger feet. And when a successful shift was completed, the bike rewarded its rider with a boggy and doggy two-stroke letdown. “Third gear is so much higher than second that the engine won’t pull after the shift.” The staff blamed the very design of the powerplant itself, moaning, “the engine doesn’t breathe well enough to wind up far enough in second to find the powerband in third.”
Getting the bike to slow down seemed about as great a pain as it was getting it up to speed. The rear brake chattered and locked up “immediately.” Fortunately, the front brake worked fairly well. In fact, the front end of this racer seemed to be the only element of the motorcycle that the staff found acceptable. While navigating through a set of whoops, “the front end comes up easily.” However, in the very next sentence, they note, “…and then the rear end goes berserk. Instantly, the front wheel slams back onto the ground in a hobby-horse fashion. The rear wheel paws the air.”
The Cycle News testers said the 1973 TM250 “does handle like a feather—a feather in a hurricane.”
The story doesn’t get much better. Some of the friendly words that appear near the end of the test include “flails,” “horrible,” and the scientific engineering term, “garbage.” Apparently, even the distributor was well aware of the TM’s shortcomings, for when they returned the motorcycle to U.S. Suzuki, a company rep asked, “whether anyone got hurt on it?”
The same ad team that had dubbed the TM400 the Cyclone pitched this Suzuki 250 with taglines that were cut out of whole cloth.
“A 220-pound streak of lightning that handles like a feather.” Nifty scrivening, to be sure, but had they actually spent time on the TM250, they would have likely agreed with the Cycle News’ team summation that the bike “does handle like a feather—a feather in a hurricane.”
“What the heck happened,” asked the test crew. Surely, Suzuki could do better than this? The works bikes ridden by Roger DeCoster and Joel Robert may have been world beaters, but the CN staff felt that the new TM250 would be better classified as a “…body beater. Somewhere along the line, there has been a sorry lack of communication between the European racing department and the production engineering department.”
“So, what is there to recommend about the TM250 Suzuki,” the test concluded? “Well, not much,” and the writer threw down a laundry list of the reasons why you shouldn’t buy this motorcycle, including the fact that it was “obnoxiously noisy.”
Evidently, Suzuki figured they could save some weight by leaving off the muffler. We said the bike was “obnoxiously noisy.”
This motorcycle was like an ill-mannered relative who shows up as a houseguest; it was a wrongheaded move to invite them in the first place, and one counts the minutes until they leave the premises. And, they are nothing at all like their sophisticated, high-class kin!CN
