Yamaha Seca 650 Turbo PDF Manual Review

One that is lightweight and possesses good handling, is fuel efficient and gives up none of the mid displacement virtues, yet upon command will deliver the performance of an engine with almost twice the displacement size? Yamaha Turbo falls short of these On paper the expectations, but only slightly. Charts, graphs and drag strip timing slips do not necessarily make a motorcycle. Nor do they tell the whole story.

What does make this motorcycle is the straight-forward thinking behind it. Unfortunately, first impressions are usually lasting impressions, and one look at the new and far out styling carried by the Seca Turbo and its computerized check panel leaves one with the initial impression of, “Boy, there must be a lot of complicated hardware lurking behind those body panels.” This is a natural assumption in as much as the
Yamaha Seca Turbo follows closely on the heels of a very much similarly-appearing turbo entry from Japan—Honda’s very complex “statement” of engi-Honda CX500 Turbo. But neering excellence, the like my daddy always says, “don’t assume nothing!” Yamaha 650 Seca Turbo is as simple as the The Honda CX500 Turbo is complex.

Once the “Megaforce” appearing body panels are removed (which only takes about two minutes for the main body section removal, and another five minutes to remove the engine shroud panels) what XJ650 Eurobike you have appears to be Yamaha’s with a bank of four very conventional carburetors. Fact is, except for the exposed fuel tank (the real one which looks like it belongs on a desert racer Seca 650 rather than on a sleek turbobike) the appears to be your ordinary, garden-variety Turbo type mid-displacement motorcycle that is powered by a very conventional, normally-aspirated engine. Seca And in a sense, it is. Because when the Turbo is ridden in a conventional manner, it performs exactly the way a normally-aspirated motorcycle would perform.

And when called upon to perform like a turbocharged engine, it does because it is. The “best of both worlds” is usually clouded with a gray area called “compromise.” In the world of turbocharging, this gray area is referred to as “turbo lag.” This much talked about turbo lag is a condition that occurs, in varying degrees, in all turbocharged engines. The severity of turbo lag is relative to numerous factors, from engine design to properly matching the turbocharger to the engine’s size and number of cylinders. Yamaha has done this—and more—and executed it with simplistic brilliance. XJ650LJ Seca Turbo is based on the The XJ650 Eurobike, an existing shaft-driven…