Quarter Wars

Have you ever wondered why Japanese company started to make 250cc bunch more in 80's? Here is the reason.

Around 1980 in Japan, 400cc bike were most popular among youngsters. There are 3 motorcycle license: small, middle, and unlimited motorcycle license. Small covers up to 125cc and middle is up to 400cc. It was quite hard to obtain unlimited MC license; majority of them failed over dozen of times and some never received the license. Needless to say, a lot of them rode 400cc motorcycles at least till they can pass the unlimited MC test. Smaller displacement bikes like 250cc class were considered as utility motorcycles, until Yamaha's RZ250's arrival and started out-running 400cc bikes on the street.


There are pretty strict vehicle inspection on over 250cc vehicles. The inspection cost you huge chunk of money (Like over 1000 US dollar worth of Yen just to get it done. If it needs to be fixed, that would be more) and as your vehicle gets older, the inspection has to be performed more frequently. So for a 10 years old vehicle, you have to cough up extra money for the inspection every year, making it cheaper to buy brand new vehicle sometimes...Yep, keeping old vehicle is a luxury in Japan. Or unpractical... whichever you prefer to call it. That might be one of the reasons Japanese automotive industry grew so fast.

So 250cc bikes actually being 249cc, they don't have to go through the inspection. Making it way cheaper to maintain. And if its performance was equivalent of 400cc and being able to get on highway with it, which one would you choose?

In the way, the RZ 250 was as sensational as CB750 in 60's.

RZ250 forced other Japanese companies to build their own sporty 250cc models. Honda made VT250(4 stroke motor , the Honda thing),
Suzuki put out even more sporty RG250 (it was basically a racer replica) and Kawasaki was little late on the game but kept up by releasing GPz250.

Many of them had some type of cowling, which was not allowed on street models in Japan for some reason, so the manufacturers claimed that they were "meter visors". Haha.
Each model kept adding sporty features, VT250 had the first hydraulic clutch lever and RG even had twin disc brakes on front and its tachometer reading started from 3000rpm, just like a racer.

The whole 250cc war was called quarter boom. And pushed the limit of 250cc models.