Greatest Rider of all Time - Page 3

 Julian Bond wrote:

He's the first guy I thought of, but didn't he spend his whole GP career
on Japanese two strokes? If so, I'd call him the first modern-era rider.
  Maybe the jump I'm thinking of is really too big, or I don't really
know the history that well. I know Honda came to dominate GP in the '60s
with four strokes, and I think of all the other Japanese machines as two
strokes, although I'm not sure about that. If so, the last four stroke
win in 125 was by Honda in 1966 and the last in 250 by Honda in '67,
before they pulled out? Don't know about grid filler, but what was the
last point where a guy could work his way up through the classes (not
that they really did that back then) all on four strokes? I think that
was Hailwood's and Agostini's history, but Read won his first races and
championship in 125 and 250 on Yamahas.

So I guess anyone who was at the end of his career in the mid-80s in 500
and started in the smaller classes probably almost had to be racing a
Yamaha two-stroke in 250 and maybe 350 in the early '70s. Which made
Saarinen another possibility had he not been killed. So how many options
were there on 500 four strokes at that time? Any beyond MV?