SWANSONG STROKER: HONDA NSR250R SP

For the sake of science and box-ticking, we let Timmy loose on a special stroker that's older than him. Here's what he made of it...

- TIM NEAVE

Once a familiar sight and smell, two-stroke smoke is now something of a rarity, but one thing is for sure… it’ll never get old. The influence of the blue haze is enough to get most motorcycle enthusiasts giddy and reminiscent, thinking back to times long gone. The bikes. The rides. The mates. I missed the two-stroke era by a handful of years, and when I started road racing in 2014, they were all but phased out on that front too, apart from in the form of the Aprilia 125 Superteen Challenge still running at club level, but even that was counting down its days for the four-stroke invasion. On the MotoGP scene, the 250GP class was replaced by the four-stroke Moto2 class in 2010 and two years later, the two-stroke GP125s were scrapped for 250cc four-stoke Moto3 machines. And just like that, the world as we knew it was done and dusted, banished into the annals of history. Well, kind of…