Description
If you’re looking at the gorgeous 350LC here and asking yourself why I would want one of those then there’s only two genuine reasons: either you pathologically hate two-strokes or you’ve picked up the wrong magazine at the newsagents! Many of us have a soft spot for the 350 Elsie and here’s why. When pretty much every other mainstream manufacturer had walked away from the 350 capacity class, Yamaha kept at it and for sound financial reasons. The larger LC’s development costs were shared by its smaller 250cc brother and Yamaha knew that the quarter litre machine was going to fly out of dealers’ showrooms. When the LC twins arrived the duo effectively obsoleted everything else that had gone before it. Until this point in motorcycle evolution no one in modern times had been bold enough to launch smaller capacity, liquid-cooled, stroker twins, commercially. The closest anyone had come previously was the water-cooled Scotts but that had been half a century ago. Yet here in metal, plastic and rubber come 1980, was a machine that looked like someone had vaguely sanitised a pure track machine… which was exactly the reaction Yamaha had been hoping for. As early as 1973 when customers were buying air-cooled RD250s and 350s the privateer racers were spending their hard-earned on liquid-cooled TZ350s. The move to water-cooling added a substantial level of enhanced reliability as two-stroke race machines became more powerful.
