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I’m fortunate, as far as motorcyclists go. My tastes are simple, and I own or have owned most of the motorcycles I’ve desired over the years. That is, most of the motorcycles I’ve desired. There’s one bike I’ve been interested in ever since I started riding, and I think my time to buy one is running out. I’m talking about the Honda NSR250.
When I was a kid, it was the first sportbike I ever really wanted, and though I’ve ridden and owned others, that initial moto-desire has never really gone away. There’s a good reason for that—here in North America, there aren’t many machines in this niche.
Fully-faired motorcycles were just entering the market as the Honda NSR250 went on sale in Japan in 1986. Although we revere the old Kawasaki GPZ900 Ninja as a first-gen sportbike, it was really machines like this Honda and the GSX-R 400 that brought modern faired sportbikes into existence a couple of years earlier for Japanese buyers. Photo: Trevor Linkletter
First-Gen Sportbike
The NSR250 came to market in the mid-1980s as the street-legal counterpart to Honda’s two-stroke RS250R racebike. It was the classic race-on-Sunday, sell-on-Monday bait and switch. Honda’s factory racers would take home the wins with the RS, and then dealerships could handily flog the NSR.
The NSR was in production all the way to 1999 through multiple generations, and depending which version you bought, it might not have a whole lot in common with Honda’s GP lineup, mechanically speaking. Today, we see this phenomenon with the Repsol-branded CBR300 series, which is a far cry from Marc Marquez’s bike. However, some of the NSR models were fairly high-performance bikes for their day, and it’s only recently that the motorcycle market has produced four-strokes on par with the NSR’s performance.
The bike in these photos is an MC16-series 1986 model. That was the bike’s first year of production, at least for non-JDM customers, and it’s powered by a liquid-cooled oil-injected two-stroke 90-degree V-twin. Max power is a claimed 45 hp at 9500 rpm; max torque is 26.8 lb-ft at 8,500 rpm. Of course it’s carbureted; the gearbox is a six-speed.
“Hey, where’s my TFT screen?” Unlike modern racebikes, the NSR has a very stripped-down cockpit. Photo: Trevor Linkletter
Those are hardly stratospheric power numbers, but you’ve got to remember this bike came out in the mid-1980s, and when people thought sportbikes, they thought about big four-cylinder production-based superbikes. Honda’s VFR series made a lot more power, but those machines weighed far, far more than the NSR’s 310-lb wet weight. This was truly a race-bred machine, based off next-generation tech, coming into the market at roughly the same time as the Suzuki GSX-R series and Kawasaki’s Ninja lineup.
However, its closest competition upon debut was likely Yamaha’s similar race-bred two-stroke sportbikes. Some of those machines were actually imported to North America by the manufacturer, but far as I can tell, the Honda NSR250 was never officially brought in. The machines you see for sale here are all gray-market imports, and often quite pricey.
This bike here
That’s what makes this machine somewhat interesting; at an asking price of $6,900 CAD (roughly $5,100 USD), it’s the lowest-priced NSR I’ve seen in a while. It’s for sale in New Brunswick, on Canada’s east coast, about two hours north of the Maine border.
The Facebook advert has few details:
1986 Honda NSR250. Bike is in great shape. Runs and is plated for the road. Just replaced petcock, both CDI boxes, New Batery, cleaned the carbs and new fork seals. 15,247 KM.
That’s a lot of miles on a little two-smoker like this! Especially since they didn’t tend to do long days on the open road, as the riding position definitely favored smaller pilots. Alas, even if I had the money for this bike in my sock drawer, I don’t think my dad bod would fold into the cockpit anymore.
But maybe someone else can take advantage of this? Looking at the pix, it looks fairly clean, with boxy mid-1980s race replica lines. No doubt there are some non-OEM parts installed (those front signal lights?), but for the asking price, that can probably be forgiven. For what it’s worth, a look at Iconic Motorbike Auctions shows these machines going for a lot more than five Gs, although many of the machines sold there have other factors that drive up the price (race livery, condition, etc.).
This bike almost certainly came into Canada through the gray market. About 25 years ago, this was a huge business for some dealerships, trading old American cars to Japan for old bikes in return. Photo: Trevor Linkletter
If you want a modern equivalent? Good luck—nobody’s selling new street-legal two-stroke GP replicas anymore. The closest thing we’d have is the Kawasaki ZX-25R, which revs its four-cylinder all the way to 15,500 rpm to make 50 horsepower. That machine isn’t available in North America either, although there is talk that a closely related ZX-4R may arrive here someday. With modern electronics and fuel-injected four-stroke engine, a modern ZX-25R would arguably be technically superior to the old NSR, but it would weigh almost 100 pounds more. Wouldn’t you rather be traveling around on a bike with GP-bred handling, leaving a haze of two-stroke smoke behind you?
The post Honda NSR250: Two-Stroke Race Replica Fun appeared first on Adventure Rider.
