Greek Tragedy (With A Happy Ending)

It arrived from Athens, a hound with a bag of nails in its jaws. After untold amounts of pain, suffering and expense, Tony Barrow’s RG finally emerged, as the pristine square four he always craved.

- Jim Moore

All great art is made from suffering, it is said. If that’s the case, Tony Barrow’s 1986 RG500 is nothing short of a masterpiece. It’s taken the 36-year-old IT entrepreneur the best part of three years to work his Suzuki through a complete top-to-bottom restoration, and it was a masochistic hurt-fest of anguish from start to finish. “It’s fought me every step of the way,” he says with a grin that testifies to past pain and relief in equal measure. “I’ve restored loads of bikes and cars in the past, but this thing damn near killed me getting it to this stage. There were times when I seriously doubted whether it was worth carrying on with it.” Having previously owned and enjoyed a Honda NS400R and later a brief and altogether less satisfying stewardship of a Yamaha RD500LC – “I only rode that to the MoT station and back before I sold it; a real anti-climax,” says Tony. A confirmed two-stroke nut, he started off with a DT50 aged 14 before working his way through an Aprilia AF1 50 and numerous SP-spec 250s. He then decided the big stroker kicks he craved would only be satisfied by an RG500. 

“I posted on the RGV forum that I was looking for an RG and a guy on there, Stathis, got in touch. He’d bought one to restore, but knew he’d never get around to doing it. I’d had dealings with him before so the fact he was in Athens, Greece, didn’t worry me. I was looking for a project rather than a minter so having to rely on pictures before buying wasn’t an issue either. It cost me £900 to get it shipped over to the UK though.”