Yamaha Faster Sons: Building Bikes to Believe In

With projects like Yamaha's Yard-Built, the R nineT Custom Contest, and H-D's Battle of the Kings: it is becoming more apparent now than ever that people want custom bikes. They want to ban all possibility of pulling up to a red light and seeing someone on the same bike next to them (then sharing that sort of awkward "yeah, I thought this one was cool, too!" thumbs up).

Without giving too much away, the OEM that pioneered the Yard-Built initiative, Yamaha, has announced that they are taking this one step further. It is hard to tell by the video and their campaign exactly what Faster Sons is, but we know it involves Shinya, so we're probably going to dig it.

The video shows a young Shinya Kimura imagining he is an airplane pilot in his father's plane, then growing up and designing an awesome custom motorcycle built around his dad's old XS650 and inspired by aeronautical styling. What I get from that: respecting the past, paying homage to their heritage and being inspired by the feats of yesterday, but building off of modern full-force platforms to bring us full performance oriented bikes that have some classic styling elements and aren't just underpowered retro-styled engines with new brakes.

This could be another collaboration with elite builders doing concept bikes that we will never get to ride, it could be offering more customizable platforms like the XJR1300 to the US market!? (I know I'm dreaming, but let me have this one). Or who knows, maybe they're taking some of the yard-built bikes and working with the custom builders and their team of engineers to bring some of the more retro/custom styled builds up to modern spec and to production? That's what I'm hoping for, but for now, we can just wait and see.