Mallory Bonanza celebrates 50 years of the TZ750
This year’s Mallory Park Bike Bonanza confirmed its status as the classic bike event of the year with a packed two-day programme of motorcycling nostalgia.
The feature event of this year’s Bonanza focussed on the 50th Anniversary of the Yamaha TZ750 with a packed grid of the awesome, four-cylinder two-stroke machines that changed the face of motorcycle racing when first introduced in 1974.
Until 1974 750cc racing had been dominated by four-strokes in a production-based class called Formula 750. But the two-stroke tide was turning with smaller capacity 350cc Yamahas and 500cc road-based machines from Kawasaki and Suzuki capable of competing on level terms with the 750cc Triumph, BSA, and Norton four-strokes that had rules the roost since the class had been introduced.
Yamaha changed all that when they homologated their four-cylinder two-stroke racer for the Formula 750 class and virtually wiped out the four-stroke challenge overnight – and had the beating of new 750cc Suzuki and Kawasaki two-strokes too.
Yamaha’s first TZ featured a 700cc engine in a conventional twin-shock frame but as the bike developed it grew to a full 750cc engine in a monoshock frame and dominated the class.
Mallory Park boss Stuart Hicken said: “Yamaha’s TZ750 was a game changer. In 1974, when it was launched, the 700cc engine produced 90bhp, almost 20bhp more than the British triples. The TZ750 featured in many of the thrilling Mallory Park Race of the Year feature events back in the day. They accelerated like nothing else on the circuit with the kind of raw horsepower that was too much for the chassis and the tyres of the era. But my goodness were they exciting to watch.
“Among the packed grid of TZ750s we had at the Bonanza, were a couple of Yamaha Canada-liveried bikes, both I believe to have links with Steve Baker. Keith Huewen and his former backer Arne Fletcher brought the Len Manchester-liveried TZ750 Keith won the 1979 ACU British Solo Championship on, while Euan Thacker had the ex-Dave Potter British Superbike title-winning bike that was run by team owner Ted Broad in BP livery.”
Guest of honour at the Bonanza was American Steve Baker, who won the 1977 World Championship riding a Yamaha Motor Canada OWO1 TZ750. For the parade laps, he borrowed a replica of the bike he raced back in the 1970s and quickly acclimatised to the bike and the circuit, looking totally at ease on the 130bhp machine around the famous Mallory circuit.
“It was great coming back to Mallory. I’ve so many great memories of the circuit from my time in the Match Races and in the Race of the Year,” he said.
Hailing from Bellingham, Washington state, near the Canadian border, Baker first came to race in England in 1975, as a member of the American team in the Transatlantic Match races. Bad weather and a crash curbed Baker’s performances at Mallory that Easter, though he bounced back at the Oulton round to finish fifth in the final race. But a year later, he really made his mark on 750cc racing with his Yamaha Motor Canada TZ750 OW31 factory bike, fettled by Bob Work, the man who ran the Canadian-based race ‘team’.
Baker won both Brands Hatch races, despite not having raced on the Kentish track the previous year as snow cancelled the meeting. He finished fourth and second at Mallory (he had crashed early in the 1975 debut there so had little experience of the circuit too) but then won both the final two races at Oulton Park to become the top scorer in the series by some distance.
Baker returned to Mallory later in the year and dominated the 1976 Race of the Year, becoming the first American to win the prestigious race – and he did it in style, beating a class field that included Barry Sheene (a winner of the race in 1974 and ‘75), fellow American Pat Hennen and muti-world champion, Giacomo Agostini.
Baker said: “I really liked Mallory. It was very similar to Westwood, a track near Vancouver that I raced on a lot in my early career – tight, twisty, a ‘scrapper’s kind of track. I loved Gerrards. The long super-fast sweeper was somewhere you could make up a heap of time if you got through their right.”
If ‘76 was a great season, 1977 was a stellar one with Baker dominating the Formula 750 World Championship, including a win at the Daytona 200 on an updated OW31 TZ750, and finishing runner up to Barry Sheene in the 500cc World Championship, even though his debut GP season was hampered by push starts compared to the clutch start F750 and American races.
Mallory Park boss, Stuart Hicken, said: “It was a pleasure to welcome Steve back to Mallory. He thrilled everyone when he raced here back in the 1970s and he was a huge hit here again this weekend. He spent time signing autographs with the fans, and chatting with old friends, but he also got in plenty of laps and looked so good out on the bike again. When he set off on the first parade, he looked steady away for a couple of laps, but once he got into it on the borrowed TZ750 he looked really quick, and showed all of that style that made him something of a Mallory hero back in the day.”
Other Mallory Park heroes included: John Cooper, the ‘Master of Mallory’, and whose defeat of Giacomo Agostini and the 500GP MV Agusta while riding a production-based BSA Rocket III is legendary. John also brought along the Seeley G50 that was built by Colin Seeley in 1966 and raced by John Blanchard and Derek Minter before John got it and raced it until 1972 on British short circuit and in GPs. 1970s John Player Norton star Dave Croxford, nine times TT winner Charlie Williams and Neil Tuxworth, one of the legends of British motorcycle sport as a competitor in the 1970s and 80s – and then as Honda Racing team boss from 1989 until 2017, were also visitors to the event
Keith Huewen, three-time British champion, former works Suzuki rider, and television broadcaster, brought along Keith Fletcher’s Len Manchester Motorcycle Yamaha TZ750 he won the first of his British titles on in 1979. Keith also did an admirable job as the roving commentator, bringing added life to the event with interviews of key figures from Mallory’s glorious past and present.
The paddock was full of bikes with historical importance; like John Hackett’s recently restored Seeley G50 that Alan Barnett finished second to Agostini in the 1970 German GP. Bernie Saunders brought along a selection of ex-Honda Britain race bike he has restored, including a rare RS850, the water-cooled V4 TT Formula One bike raced in the UK by Wayne Gardner and on the roads by Joey Dunlop. Tony Smith showed his just-restored Christian Sarron’s 1984 250cc World Championship-winning Yamaha. Lloyd Dickinson brought his six-cylinder, 297cc Honda replica of the 1966 RC174.
The Trident and Rocket 3 Owners Club joined forces with the Rob North Triples group to provide a packed grid of the three-cylinder, overhead valve, air-cooled four-stroke superbike that were produced by the BSA/Triumph group from 1968 until 1975.
More modern MotoGP machines included; Steve Bones 2013 ex-Forward Racing FTR 213, Carl Atkinson’s2013 FTR 213 ex-Forward Racing and a Ducati Desmosedici 1000RR – and Dean Simpkins’ brought along the ex-Kurtis Roberts V5. And, bang up to date but with a lot of historical relevance was Brian Crighton’s latest Crighton CR700W rotary on track.
Brian created the 120bhp race-winning Norton rotaries that dominated British superbike races into the mid-1990s, but this latest rotary, a limited production CR700W rotary produces 220bhp, 105 ft lbs of torque and weighs just 129.5kg. BSB racer Leon Jeacock used the bike to lead out the TZ750 parade to give a hint of the rotary-powered machine’s potential.
There was also a full programme of British championship dirt track racing on the purpose-built oval just beyond Gerrard’s, the ever-popular classic trial run by the Owd Codgers MCC, and for the first time at the Bonanza, EMRA club road races. Royal Enfield and Triumph supported the show new bikes on display while renowned Triumph collector Dick Shepherd brought along a selection of classic Triumph off-road bikes as well as one of the factory Triumph motocrossers, the first time a full works TF-250X has been seen by the UK public.
Hicken concluded: “It was a fabulous weekend. The paddock was super busy with a lot of really interesting special bikes. We had over 300 entries for the parades, in addition to the TZ750, Rob North triples and GP Legends parades so it was super busy and showed the depth of interest in classic bikes is not waning. The track action was full-on both days because we also had the EMRA club races and the Plop Enduro.
“There was live action off-road too with the DTRA and the Owd Codgers doing their thing with the classic trial and we also had some 50 bike club stands. We said we’d offer something for everyone at the Bonanza and I think we achieved just that. Now the hard work begins in earnest to plan the 2025 Mallory Park Bike Bonanza.
Words courtesy Mallory Park. Images by superbike.co.uk