Beauty in Utility
18 03 09 - 21:20 At the start of December I picked up a 1993 Suzuki DR800 to use for commuting and general winter hackery. I'd got a bit bored of riding Sarah's GPZ500 and fancied something a bit different, and besides, having got a shiny new lease car to go to work in she's looking to get rid of the GPZ, her old Golf, and the CG125 in order to buy something else (probably an SV650) to play on in the summer.My musings led me to the idea of a big single-cylinder trailie, and then (perhaps unsurprisingly to those who know me) to the temptations of the biggest single-cylinder bike of them all. A bit of eBay impulsiveness later and I was on the train to King's Lynn with a helmet in one hand and a wad of cash in the other.
Since then I've fallen for the 'King of Thumpers'. I've put over 2500km on it in less than three months, and ridden it in the snow, the salt and the mud of a UK winter. While there's still no beating the ZXR400 for playing around in the summer sun, the DR is the first bike I've owned that's incited me to take the long way home on a frosty January afternoon, or made me enjoy - and even seek out - badly-surfaced, mud-strewn single track roads.
However while it's certainly utilitarian, and perhaps even good looking in a rugged kind of way, the big red DR is certainly not beautiful - especially now it bears the scars of a slide down the road on its side a couple of weeks ago. So why the title?
This is the mother of all DR's, and it belongs to Stefan Hessler. It began life as a Suzuki works entry for the Dakar Rally in 1990, ridden by Gaston Rahier. In 2004 it came into the possession of Herr Hessler, who brought it back to its full glory. I'm a bit hazy on the exact specifications of the bike because the Hessler Motorsports site is (naturally) auf Deutsch, and it's so easy to keep getting distracted by the pictures rather than trying to translate the text. I'll leave you to do the same using the links below. Me? I'm running away before I get too tempted by the plethora of DR BIG tuning goodies which Hessler Motorsports sell.
DR Zeta 820 Gallery and Specs
Hessler Motorsports Homepage
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