May 2005

The May 2005 Bike of the Month belongs to Brett Smith from Australia.

This NSR started off as a racer in Melbourne, Australia where the former owner was racing it and had a bad accident and decided to retire from racing.

The next owner bought the bike for next to nothing and brought the bike back to Brisbane, Australia where he also planned to repair it and start racing, but the bike had sat outside for a while and he moved on to other projects.

Brett heard about this poor little NSR racer that was in need of some serious work and repairs so Brett struck up a deal with the owner and brought the bike home. The bike had been stored outside for quite some time and was in rough shape. While they were loading the NSR on to a trailer water poured out of the exhaust pipes which meant the engine will probably need to be rebuilt.

After getting the NSR back home safely at Brett's place he and some friends completely pulled the entire bike apart and made a big list of things that needed to be done. Brett did some research on the Internet which led him to this Website which in turn led him to Tyga Performance. Paul and Matt at Tyga helped him out with all his needs. Tyga recommended their GP pipes with twin single sided silencers like the NSR500 as well as the Tyga high performance reeds kit. The engine was rebuilt locally by a shop that specializes in two strokes. They kept things simple and cleaned up the ports a little. The carbs were rebuilt, rejetted and matched to a new set of Uni-pod filters.

Next step was to take care of the front end that was damaged in the big crash. Brett came across a complete front end from a late model Aprilia RS-250. He had this modified to fit his MC21 and actually works nicely. The rest of the suspension was rebuilt as well by a tuning shop for improved performance. Brakes are standard Aprilia RS-250 parts which include larger discs and Brembo cast calipers. Brett finished off the brakes with new pads and steel braided lines.

Now with the bike in nice mechanical shape and running perfect it was time to replace the bodywork. Tyga again came to the rescue with their popular NSR250 GP full kit. The bike was painted in Daijiro Katoh's old AXO colors which are truly stunning.

Bretts NSR turned out perfect and he races it quite often. In fact his NSR is a racer only and gets trailered around between each race where he enjoys chasing down larger and more powerful bikes. This has got to be one of the most beautiful race only NSR bikes ever built.

Every month I try to feature a different NSR in this section. Above you can check out the featured Bike of the Month and past Bikes of the Month. Do you think your NSR belongs here ? Then send a few pictures and some information and maybe we can feature it here. Mail me here. Cheers !!