It has been over 17 years since a two-wheeled missile called the Yamaha YZF-R1 made its first appearance and enamored every school boy and adult alike with its compact, fast looking proportions. The man behind the very first model that was introduced in the year 1998, Project Leader Kunihiko Miwa got along with his successors Yoshikazu Koike (2002), Mokoto Shimamoto (2007), Toyoshi Nishida (2009) and traveled backwards in time along with Hideki Fujiwara (2015), the man behind what is now being termed as the best litre-class bike in the world.
As nostalgia hits and the men talk about their individual projects, what remains common throughout all iterations of the R1 is that all of them drew heavy inspiration from what happened on the race track. All of them benefited from Yamaha’s MotoGp programme and although the styling has become polarizing over the years, each one has bypassed it’s predecessor and set new benchmarks in the liter class segment.