Jens vom Brauck and Kedo, the German tuning and parts specialists, have taken an everyday Yamaha SR500 and gone back to the roots. The bike looks lean, mean and low—a mutant cross between a 60s desert racer and Kenny Robert’s flat track bike. It has a raw competition look, with black rims, a machined alloy swingarm, Wilbers shocks, a high exhaust and a big carb with an open filter. As vom Brauck says, it’s a bike “you could get on and pull a wheelie straight away.”
Hamburg-based Kedo is an SR and XT specialist, and provided not only insider knowledge but also the hot 50bhp SR motor, a Mikuni round-slide carb, the Harley-style tank, and that serious looking swingarm. Vom Brauck did the rest. “We’ve forgotten what biking is about,” he says. “It’s all about feeling—the sounds and the rhythm of the motor, the contact with the machine. It should be unfiltered, direct. We’ve got too sophisticated. So the D-track goes back to the roots: it has a lot of soul and in the real world, away from racetracks and autobahns, it is fast. It’s performance that is easy to use.”
The stock SR500 is already a pretty minimal motor bike—at 170kg there isn’t much obvious fat. But vom Brauck’s diet has junked 25 kilos of assorted old iron and plastic bits, and replaced them with just a few kilos of beautiful stainless steel, alloy and sculpted composite materials that vom Brauck made himself.
Although vom Brauck made his name with radical Ducati specials—such as the JvB-MOTO Ducati Scrambler—his daily all-weather transport is a beaten-up, much loved and much modified SR500. He’s ridden 250,000km on it and can change the engine in an afternoon. “An SR 500 has got so much potential, and after working with Kedo building the D-Track, I think we’ve brought it out. It’s not that hard to turn a tired old rat bike into something really exciting. They’ve got some trick parts and we’ve developed some new ones that will soon be available in their catalogue. Customers will be able to buy most of the parts for this special.” [Visit JvB-MOTO here.]
