Having decided on the exact make, model and colour scheme I was after – a black 1989 Yamaha FZR600 – all that was left was to find one, but this proved somewhat harder than first hoped. To explain why, I’ll need to talk a little about the model history both worldwide and in Australia, as well as what living in Australia – particularly in South Australia – can mean when bike hunting.
The FZR600 was released in 1989, and at the time was a bike that immediately became the bike of choice for anyone looking for a middleweight sports bike. Lighter, more powerful and with better handling than anything else on the road, it held top spot as the go-to hooligan bike for a couple of years, until the CBR600 caught up and didn’t let go.
As far as I can tell (and if there are any Yamaha historians out there then I’d welcome their input), the main markets for the FZR600 were the USA, Europe and to a lesser extent Australia. For some reason, probably known only to the folks in either Marketing or Product Development in Yamaha at the time, the models weren’t released consistently in Australia compared to the other regions.
1989 saw the first version released globally, of which my former love had been one. 1990 saw a barely changed version, aside from a slightly modified colour scheme and four-piston caliper brakes at the front end rather than the two-piston jobs on the 1989 – or at least according to the reviews this was the only difference, but in a later post I’ll disprove this.
My black ’89 3HE with a friend’s white single-headlight ’91 3HE. Under the skin, pretty much identical.
1991 saw a change in the styling of the front fairing, moving away from the twin ‘bug eye’ headlight to a single headlight version, and this remained unchanged globally through to 1993. These bikes from ’89 to ’93 are often referred to by their model code – 3HE.
This is where things get messy.
In 1994, the YZF600 (model code 4JH) was released in Australia – a completely different beast from the FZR600 – and sales of the FZR ended. In the USA and Europe, the YZF600 was released as the FZR600R (at least as far as I can tell), but the old 3HE was continued, and it reverted back to the twin-headlight front end. Again, the reasons for this are probably only known to whoever was running the marketing department at the time. Sales of the FZR600 (not the R) in the USA and possibly Europe continued through with minimal change other than to the colour schemes until 1999, at which time the R6 arrived and everything else was thrown out the window by Yamaha in the 600cc supersport line.
So what did all this mean for me? Well, it meant that the run of bikes that I was looking at were only released in Australia for two years, and even then not in great numbers. Having a single headlight model wasn’t an option – I never really cared much for the look, and it was different from what I had had back in the day, so no dice (even though I have since heard of at least one person retrofitting the twin headlight fairing to a later model). If I had been in the USA or Europe then I’d have had more like eight years of releases to choose from, but not here.
So the hunt began in earnest in early 2018. My experience focused on two main channels – Bikesales and Gumtree. More recently Facebook marketplace has also become a thing, and the dear old Trading Post still occasionally has people use it (probably only misty-eyed Gen-Xers like me who can still remember waiting at the local newsagent for the physical Trading Post to be released when hunting for second hand cars), but realistically Bikesales and Gumtree proved to be the best bets.
Given that I still keep one eye keenly on the papers looking for anyone who might be selling a parts bike matching mine, I believe that in now what has been 16 months of looking, I have seen four bikes in Australia that match the criteria.
That’s it – four.
There had been a few more of the single headlight version, and the odd one here or there which had been converted to a streetfighter and was not a feasible restoration project, or which was little more than a parts bike, so these were pretty much it.
After looking for a few months I even started contacting vintage bike clubs and importers, and got nothing back but variants of ‘nah, don’t really see them any more these days’. What made it worse was looking at forums in the US and UK and hearing them spoken of as cheap and plentiful. Not here they weren’t.
In hindsight it wasn’t at all surprising that finding the exact, nearly thirty-year old bike I was after was a challenge. The characteristics of the FZR600 combined with the demographic of buyer at the time combined with the fact that there weren’t that many to start with almost certainly means that most of them would have either been thrashed, crashed or converted to track bikes already. Not being in any way rare or collectible at the time would have meant it would be a pure fluke that anyone in Australia would have a pristine original one tucked away in a collection (but I’d love to know if there are), and I suspect that most of them ended up scattered throughout wreckers yards before too many years went past.
It was also at this point that I realised not only the limitations of living in Australia, but in particular the limitations of living in South Australia. For those who don’t know, South Australia is a state of nearly a million square kilometres in size inhabited by less around 1.5 million people. That’s about one and a half times the size of Texas but with the population of Phoenix AZ (or alternatively twice the size of Spain but with the population of Barcelona). With an overall population of around 25 million in all of Australia, finding an FZR600 from the two years of production I was interested in was unlikely at best, which meant that I’d more than likely need to source one from interstate, where they have much bigger populations likely to have one tucked away somewhere.
But that in itself brings challenges. The nearest other major city is around 800km away, with the other cities all at least 1200km away, and this adds
another layer of logistics, risk and cost into the equation. Freight from most other cities to Adelaide using a dedicated bike transport company is likely to be anywhere from $400 to $800. The alternatives are to fly there and ride back (expensive, time consuming and risky on an older bike, not to mention uncomfortable on a sportsbike) or to hire a bike trailer and hit the road, which is twice as time consuming and quite frankly a massive drag in terms of spending several days driving several thousand kms towing a bike on a trailer. When you break it down, freighting one might not be cheap, but it is by far the most sensible option. .
Even with all this hanging over me, I had my alerts all set up everywhere I could think of, and then the waiting game began. My first potential bike was located in Perth (3000km and around $800 in freight from Adelaide), a badly abused black ’89 with unknown kilometres that had been converted into a track bike, with the asking price from memory being $1500. The catch? It came with a parts bike and a whole bunch of spares, and the seller wouldn’t split it to even consider selling just the one I wanted, which would have pushed the freight costs well over the grand mark. I asked a few times, but the seller found someone local and the bike and all the extras were gone.
It was June, six months after the search began and long after the sense of hopelessness had set in that I would ever find one, that a suitable candidate was found…
Next time: the search ends.