Is It Really a Museum?
Yamaha has a rich history and the company wants to showcase that history at various spots in Europe. The company has a new museum to help it do that. It officially opened the museum on September 25, 2019. It is called the Yamaha Motor Collection Hall, and it’s the first museum of its kind from a Japanese bike manufacturer to be opened outside of Japan.
Calling the place a museum is a bit of an untruth, though. Apparently, the museum isn’t open to the public. Instead, there will be several events in Europe that the bikes housed there will appear at. As RideApart notes, the museum is actually “more of a really, really nice warehouse where they store motorcycles between events.” I guess the word museum sounds nicer.
With my recent AIMExpo experience with Yamaha, this really doesn’t surprise me. However, I can only imagine the cost it must take to run a legit museum with all of the awesome stuff that Yamaha appears to have there. Most of the company’s iconic racing machines are housed at the museum, including Stéphane Peterhansel’s Dakar winning YZE750 from 1991, Stefan Everts’s 2006 Motocross World Championship winning YZ450F, and Ben Spies’s R1 that won the World Superbike Championship in 2009.
Maybe Yamaha will open up the museum to the public at some point down the road. That would be a wonderful thing for the company to do and would be yet another reason I’d like to visit Amsterdam.
