My own interest in the two-stroke, which had reached the level of an obsession by 1963, was generated by comparative poverty. Those engineers were motivated by the need to demonstrate that the two-stroke engine, per se, was worthwhile -as that would stimulate sales of their companies' ordinary touring models. To say that they were ultimately successful would be gross understatement. A very few engines had begun to appear in which some of the theoretical promise was realized however, and this encouraged engineers at MZ, Yamaha and Suzuki to persist in their efforts to wring competitive power output from the racing two-stroke engine. The two-stroke was recognized as having substantial theoretical promise, as it delivered a power stroke for each 360 degrees of crankshaft rotation but the hard reality was that each individual power impulse was too feeble to amount to much when totaled at the output end of the crankshaft. Only ten years ago the two-stroke engine was widely and quite understandably thought to be a "reasonable alternative to the four-stroke only when minimum weight and manufacturing cost were all-important considerations.
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