New kid on the block

[SteelD]

And I mean 'kid' - who's in the queue for one of these?

Not me I'm afraid.  

[Red01]

It takes a small, light adult to ride one and be competitive, I'm sure, but a mini-bike it's not.  

There's more on vintage 1960-1967 Suzuki racers here.

1953-1959 Suzuki (called Colleda back then) history is here.

For those who haven't discovered it yet, there's an excellent web site that covers almost all Suzukis ever built. It just keeps getting better and better with time as the owner comes closer to accomplishing the task of documenting Suzuki motorcyle history.

"All Suzuki Motorcycles Ever Built" - www.SuzukiCycles.org  

[SteelD]

That's an amazing resource. I love the GT triples but maybe that's because that's what was around when I became bike-aware as a teenager.

[ZenMan]

And I mean 'kid' - who's in the queue for one of these?

Not me I'm afraid.  

Don't laugh, D... if a guy can go fast on a li'l ol' 50cc, what happens when you put him on a RZ350? Those little guys blew the 750's and 1000's into the weeds all the time. I know, I had more than one 250 and 350 2-stroke F-bike rider embarrass me on  my 750 superbike! Small in stature, big on skills.  

I was too big to ever race the smaller displacement classes, but I always loved the little racers. Many manufactures took the tiny-cc classes pretty seriously, like Honda:



And you can still buy one of these NSR50R's brand new, race it in the pitbike class:



Want a 50cc street screamer for the city?:



Some guys would take a MB5, put a full fairing on it, pipe, port & polish, and high compression piston and race it. The great thing about the smaller classes is you could enter the bigger classes and be fairly competitive, but mostly to get a lot of track time, maybe 5 or 6 sprints a day. It's really cheap racing and a lot of fun.  

[Red01]

I don't find the NSR50 still on the Honda site, but they have a similar looking NSF100, 4-stroke:
It's an '06 model, but they're still listing it as available.



Back in '04 they offered the NSR50 and a "full size" 50cc 4-stroke naked racer called the Dream 50:

[ZenMan]

I don't find the NSR50 still on the Honda site,

I think '05 was the last year of production, but new leftovers can probably still be found. I knew you would "investigate"...  

Thanks for the "Dream" pics, I was looking for that bike! I saw some on Ebay a week ago that had full fairings on them. (now before you jump me on that one, they could have been aftermarket fairings.   )

I just love those brave little racebikes... I wish I was about 6" shorter and 100 lbs. lighter so I could ride one!