Yamaha's Yard Built projects have led the way in the revival of the custom motorcycle world. Developing relationships with the rock stars of bike building, the project has delivered an incredible line up of unique and breath-taking one-off Yard Builts based on the Yamaha Sport Heritage line. Legendary builders from across the globe have brought their skills and expertise to show how easy it is to customize Yamaha's intuitive and adaptable retro-style bikes. The project has given inspiration and set new trends in the motorcycle world, making it a reality for everyone to make their Yamaha their own. 
 

Patrick Sauter, from Mellow Motorcycles, says it himself : “There are not many things in the world I like more than King Kenny Roberts and the Speedblock-Design.”Indeed, the bike's incredible livery features Kenny Roberts' iconic Speedblock-Design colours. But the birth of this project does not stop at the design of the bike, it aims to make it perform like a real race bike, made to win in a Flat Track race.

The bike used for this project is a 2020 XSR700. The modifications start with the installation of a complete XSR900 front end, which has an inverted fork, which has been lowered to adapt it to Flat Track conditions. The second step was to equip the bike with wire wheels, built by HE-Motorradtechnik.

Next was the creation of the exhaust system, with two precisely machined Racefit pipes. This was a tricky part of the job, as it had to be fine-tuned to fit the aluminium monocoque and the separate tank. The fuel tank beneath the aluminium monocoque is made of stainless steel. The difficult part about making it as small as possible was to fit in the original fuel pump. Colin Habla managed to give it a capacity of 6.5 Liters, which is sufficiently compared to the low fuel consumption of the powerplant.
 

Finally, the next step was to optimize the settings with test rides, to make the bike easier and faster.

Let's leave the final word to Patrick Sauter, to describe what this XSR700 King Kenny can offer you: 

“Imaging your built starting for the first time after months, finally powder coating the frame and putting everything in its final place. The starter motor does its job and the spark plugs preparing the ultimate boom to blow up your complete acoustic meatus. All mechanics take a step back and suddenly think: what the fuck. You give it the first rev and your heart hums. At idle speed it already feels like a big block V8 drag car is ready for war. As soon as the throttle body opens its hallway the anxiety kicks in. We’re standing beside a bad muffled armour, which is firing shots up to 10.000 rpm. The Racefit pipes on this exhaust manifolds are everything they didn’t tell you in school. Rude, indecent and loud.

After a few laps you immediately feel safe on this bike. The chassis is stable, predictable and the engine has a linear power development. The bike acts completely unagitated and lets you find the exciting point towards the limit smoothly. Thanks to the lowered spring elements the bike runs lush on the perfectly prepped track in Lelystad. With a shortened secondary transmission you can always throttle the XSR700 out with a big bang."