My series of my favorite bikes from AHRMA racing continues with a legend owned by a legend: Nick Ienatsch’s Yamaha TZ750! Oh…and it happens to be street legal!
Nick will be working with Iconic to sell some of his bikes, and after months of emails it was wonderful to finally meet him in person! We met at the Inde Motorsport Ranch round of AHRMA where he led a track walk for everyone:
He also raced his personal Yamaha FZR600 and a borrowed Yamaha TZ250 – the latter of which he entered in Sound of Thunder 2 (any AHRMA SoS or Motard machine, liquid-cooled twins to 900cc, unlimited air-cooled twins, and triples up to 765cc.). Guess who else was in SoT2? Yours truly, on my Kramer 690! It was an honor to get passed by him, and I ended up getting to share the podium with him as well:
Tommy Ryan of Underground Team Racing took the top step on a Kramer 890!
But the focus of this post is Nick’s Yamaha TZ750, which he had on display in the pits. He started it on Saturday (which I unfortunately missed) and it turns out that a fuel line was leaking so he drained it. With that in mind I don’t have video for you, but I do have a bunch of images!
After all that, you presumably want to see what it looks like with a fairing, so check out this Sport Rider story (which also gives a ton of great history on the bike).
Photo by Scott Rathburn for Sport Rider magazine
Nick mentioned to me that several journalists over the years have ridden the bike, with many flying over from Japan just for the experience. Here’s one account from the folks over at MCN in England.