What's the story with these?Don't recall ever seeing one before!I no longer read the number of bike mags i used to but i haven't seen anything about them even in classic / retro mags.Are there many about? Were they ever officially imported?Looks to be a really classic type of thumper!
The story is that when the wall came down in the early 90's MZ started to really struggle when the government backing was withdrawn. They sought financing in the private sector, but one of the conditions of the deal was that they move away from two strokes to four strokes. The design team allegedly then came up with the 500R, Saxon Country, and SilverStar all within the space of 6 weeks! Once the financial backing was in place they went on to design the Skorp, Mastiff and Baghira using the Yam 660 motor, so the previous range were dropped as soon as this happened.
The 500R was a simple drop of the Rotax 500 engine into a modified ETZ251 frame, with identical bodywork. The other two also used the modified ETZ251 frame. The Saxon Country was what we would now call an adventure bike I suppose, with a large tank, attractive cobby styling and off road pretensions and the SilverStar was designed to appeal to the traditional UK/European sporting thumper market.
The 500R was not that uncommon, with probably several hundred in the UK, but the SilverStar and Saxon Country only reached figures of about 30 each in the UK. For uber street cred, try and find the even rarer GreenStar or RedStar, only one of each reached this country AFAIK!
