To The Crusher - Yamaha GTS1000A

The GTS1000A was supposed to be an early '90s sports-touring flagship for Yamaha, but it turned into an embarrassing farce.

Ironically, the best part of a decade later we see the goodly FJR1300 doing a much better job for half the price and with half the technology.

In 1992 the GTS was announced and Yamaha deemed it so important it had two launches. Launch one... and our very own Grant Leonard is whisked to Hotel Don Carlos down in Marbella. Next is a four-day 'unveiling', involving a £100k laser show and promo film, which showed how the bike hatched from an egg from another planet. Then Yamaha chucked in a piss-about on free jetskis, a trip to the Seville Expo and a gift of a £100 CD player with a Yamaha logo on it. A big deal at the time...

Nice.

The actual riding launch was in Marrakech. To his delight, Grant (again) scores a room bill personal best of a full £400. What followed was some fantastic riding up to the Atlas mountains, miles of endless red desert, with the bikes nose to tail, slipstreaming, flat-out.

So the GTS sounded like a bike from heaven, but it wasn't. It featured a de-tuned FZR1000 EXUP motor, which was strangled to just 100bhp in anticipation of a blanket Euro law which never happened. It also had fuel-injection, a catalyser, novel 'Omega' chassis and a funny front end which never dived. These all worked, but what was the point? They should have just covered an EXUP with bacofoil and charged an extra three grand for it. The GTS had an £11,000 price tag and did the job less well than a Kawasaki ZZ-R1100 which was faster and two grand cheaper. The Yam also had chain drive, which wasn't the best thing to have on something which was more tourer than sports tourer...

When the bike hit the shops people didn't. And the GTS died a death in three short years... see ya later, overblown, over-egged, over-before-it-began beast!