The creation of the Yamaha Racing Heritage Club was announced at EICMA in 2021 and the Sunday Ride Classic will be the first and only event in France to host this structure in 2022.
To know a little (much) more than the official press release released last November, we collected the comments ofEric de Seynes, at the origin of this initiative which initially concerns owners of competition Yamaha, but ultimately also all enthusiasts who ride motorcycles from the brand of a certain age...
After explaining to us the genesis of Yamaha Racing Heritage Club, Eric de Seynes Here we detail how it works.
Eric de Seynes : “We divided up the roles. We recovered Marco Riva from Yamaha Motor Racing, therefore from Lin Jarvis, over the last 20 years. So he has been in MotoGP for 20 years and knows the entire competition-circuit world, with a good network in Italy. He is in charge of identifying collectors and knighting all those who want to join the club, therefore verifying that the motorcycle they have corresponds to its characteristics and that the guy is sufficiently passionate and is not a disguised dealer. behind an ingenuous face. Marco therefore takes care of the members. Afterwards, we put Ferry Brouwer back in the saddle who was Phil Read's mechanic in Grand Prix in the 70s, then who was with Kenny Roberts in the factory team, then who was the Arai importer in Europe. So he was always in the racing world, and when he retired and sold Arai, 15 or 20 years ago, there was an event which was the centenary of the first motorcycle Grand Prix in Assen. And on the occasion of this centenary in Assen, there was something incredible: Yamaha had mobilized and asked Ferry Brouwer to play the game of this event, so we had been doing it for three years. advance and we had either restored or rebuilt with original parts, or molds or drawings, the most iconic motorcycles of Yamaha Grand Prix since 1975!
So there were between 15 and 20 motorcycles that were rebuilt, reworked, restored, because for example there were no Saarinen motorcycles left! There was still a frame, and there was a factory engine in Japan, and with all that we remade a 250/350. What was great was that, where possible, all of these bikes were demonstrated at the Assen centenary with the vintage riders riding their factory bikes from the era. ! It was super moving and it was so successful that Yamaha asked Ferry to maintain these bikes and demonstrate them at three or four events a year. We couldn't do more because everyone was a volunteer and wear parts were limited.
These motorcycles were produced for around ten years then Ferry had had enough, especially since he had pushed the vice to the point of rebuilding the assistance truck of the time, an old Opel which was capping at 80 km/h, it took him three days to get to the circuits. So he stopped and Yamaha Japan got two of these bikes back. At the time, there was the Lehman Brothers crisis which meant that Yamaha didn't have the means to buy everything back, so I bought a large part of it from Ferry Brouwer so that it wouldn't go into the wild. So it was on a personal basis that I picked up 9 or 10 of them at that time.
So we kept all these motorcycles and, as a result, we appointed Ferry as being in charge of judging and certifying the technical integrity of our members' motorcycles. That's not saying much “your bike is rotten” ou
" she is good ", but it is rather saying
“it’s great but this piece was originally like that and it might be worth modifying it if you want it to really look good.” . It's more about trying to have a real technical counterpart who manages to give the best possible advice to the owner to have the most honest motorcycle possible.
So there is Ferry Brouwer who takes care of the technical part, Marco Riva who takes care of competitor relations, and you have YME marketing who chooses the events at which we perform, shared with the countries. Each country therefore takes ownership of the event and we intervene at the European level with logistical support, content and presentation. For example, Ferry tries to ensure that it is not always the same motorcycles that are on parade or presented statically. For the Sunday Ride Classic, I think they went with a theme which is more the 250cc and 350cc, which does not mean that the next time it will not be the 500cc.
300 collectors have already come forward, which represents around 2000 motorcycles, so it's nice to say that we can orchestrate this so that there are real themed exhibitions with original content to share with the public !
The Sunday Ride Classic is a very beautiful setting, the crowd is quality, and each time I went to ride there, I was amazed because there is a good mix between the modern and the old: this n It's not just nostalgic, it's also customers and current motorcycle enthusiasts who are interested in this culture and this somewhat passionate vibration.
The chemistry is really nice and we need to protect it! Because if we don't take care that there are somewhat sexy events that exist and that allow us to experience this in shared generations, it will become the last of the Mohicans and it will die out with the last Mohicans. So we have to transmit the sound of the two-stroke and the smell of castor to boys who are 14 or 22 years old, and who find it fun to ride with machines like that. These boys already exist so we just have to make sense of it, and I think we're in a period that deserves this attention: if we don't do it, we'll wake up in 10 years saying » it's ruined, it's too late! “ »
Éric de Seynes will therefore be present at the Sunday Ride Classic alongside Giacomo Agostini or Christian Sarron, not only to preach this good word but also to put his words into practice...
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