Kevin Schwantz’s Heron Suzuki

Wayback Machine

By Hamish Cooper
Published on April 10, 2022
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by Phil Aynsley
Scuffed leathers tell a story of many track excursions as Kevin learned to ride the demanding Assen track on the carbon-framed Heron Suzuki.

World champion Kevin Schwantz now owns the 500cc Suzuki that he made his Grand Prix debut on back in 1986. Today he winds back the years to relive an amazing season.

It’s not unusual for a motorcyclist to want to track down the first bike they ever owned. It’s not even unusual for a Grand Prix racer to be reunited with the motorcycle they won a world championship on decades earlier. But it is very unusual for a world champion to track down and buy the exact racer on which they made their Grand Prix debut.

That’s what 1993 World 500cc Grand Prix champion Texan Kevin Schwantz has managed to achieve. His 1986 Heron Suzuki XR70RV is considered by many to be the ultimate development of the RG500. Pushing out 148 horsepower and weighing just 253 pounds (115kg), Suzuki’s obsolete square-four 2-stroke engine had been given a new lease on life with a futuristic carbon-composite chassis. The project was conceived, built and developed by a team of enthusiasts, financed by U.K.’s Heron Suzuki. Many of them would go on to play major roles in GP racing in the 1990s and beyond.

dash of a motorcycle

Way back when

Kevin’s carbon-framed Heron Suzuki is a fascinating time warp of GP500 technology of the mid-1980s. This was a period when cigarette money was filtering across from F1 car racing to GP motorcycles, when importers like Heron Suzuki had enough clout through sales to acquire factory racing engines and employ technicians who were specialists in their chosen fields of race engineering. It was a time when both factory and privateer teams were pushing the envelope of technical development.

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