1977 really was... ...a HELLUVA YEAR Yamaha TZ350-3
It’s not often in racing that the Japanese manufacturers get wrong-footed by their European adversaries – but that’s exactly what happened to Yamaha in both the 250cc and 350cc GPs in the mid-1970s, courtesy of Harley-Davidson’s Italian affiliate, Aermacchi.
The American/Italian crew had regained dominance of 250cc Grand Prix racing, having won four world championships in a row in the early Seventies, and then matching this with a pair of 350cc crowns in 1974/75 courtesy of Agostini and Cecotto.
Yamaha had no answer to the relentless, empirical development of the Italian two-stoke twins. This allowed Walter Villa to win a hat-trick of 250cc world titles in 1974-76, culminating in a pair of championships in 1976 when he turned the stroked Harley-Davidson RR350 into a title winner, alongside the RR250 which gave birth to it.
Yamaha’s factory engineers, then concentrating on trying to regain the even more prestigious 500GP crown which Suzuki and Barry Sheene had wrested from them that same year, had no answer to this combination of Italian ingenuity backed up by American money, a fact which was not at all appreciated at the Japanese firm’s European HQ in Amsterdam, the base for
