Biker-Builder ‘Bad Winners’ Disrupts Yamaha’s Yard Built Contest
Yamaha chose the XSR700 for this year’s ‘Yard Built Contest’; a contest that has been spitting out radical and elegant custom motorcycles since 2014.
Already having a vintage heritage styling with the Yamaha XSR700, you know designers will be keen to provide builds similar to the ones they throw together with older traditional classic resto-mods: flat trackers, cafe racers, and the like. Most of these builds featured in the contest really did look like older bikes that were modded-up to today’s standards, and I think that’s a key point in the design features of the stock XSR700.
The contest video features 4 designers that built 4 separate bikes, and I can’t believe the passion these guys put into the projects featured. The Yamaha ‘Yard Built Contest’ is a great project because it provides us with pure competition-backed motorcycle designs that we can all froth over together.
DisruptiveThe ‘Disruptive’ build won the contest, of course. It features an extreme stripped-down flat-tracker look (street tracker, as the designer puts it). Bad Winners, the shop behind this build, slapped on an R1 front-end to increase the performance capabilities of the bike while featuring a ton of other bolt-on parts they custom fabricated for the project. The motorcycle has a very threatening and hard-lined yet minimalist/industrial look to it, with my favorite touch being the solid spokeless rim featured in the rear. It also has a full Akrapovič exhaust system and a beautiful seat that gives the top line of the motorcycle a very simple and angular look.
RD350 TributeMy second favorite of the bikes would have to be the RD350 Tribute. Urgo Coppola, an Italian artist, decided to take the XSR and send it back to the past and teamed with builder Pier Francesco Marchio to bring this vision to life. The motorcycle resembles a distant relative to the original 2-stroke RD350, yet if you squint hard enough at both images you can see the resemblance. The colors are on point and a major throwback to the RD350, with the new XSR featuring a classic seat and chrome exhaust pipes that really tie the look together. Marchino took parts from the FZ-09, SC950, and XJR1300 to build this mish-mash blast from the past.
Yamaha Motor posted a video to their facebook summarizing the bikes and stories behind them in their #BackToTheDrawingBoard video featured on their Facebook page. Check it out, as its a very well-put-together video that brings justice to the motorcycles that were built for the competition featuring stories from the builders themselves.