Well, they never did manage to get the powerband right, apparently. Even the newest CR500s are ridiculously zappy compared to the bike they bought and copied (and then said the big leap forward was because DeCoster joined the team!) Anyway, it seems to me that the real Japanese strength is in taking a ridiculously small four-stroke motor and making it perform better than anyone else would be able to, reliability be damned. Has it occurred to anybody that a CRF450 isn't that far removed from being 1/4 of a Civic motor, really suped-up? You have to admit, no other country has really put much effort into making 2.0L car engines that do anything but chug along with a light grocery load. It seems only natural to me that these companies would try to use that engineering on their motorsports department. And by the way, the new Lexus LFA supercar's engine was designed in part by Yamaha.
Maybe I'm just making connections where there really shouldn't be, but it does seem like small four-strokes are a fairly uniquely Japanese specialty. All the two-stroke action seems to have come first from Europe, where the 2T revolution began. That's also where 2T microcars were made by companies like Saab and... uh... Maico. And, just as a sort of plug for the home country, we had Chrysler and Mercury Marine working together on direct-injection two-strokes in the '90s, and that technology is apparently part of Mercury's current OptiMax two-stroke outboard technology that competes with Etec.
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