This Sunday, the Dakar Rally kicks off again. If you suffer from rally fever but don’t have the stones to actually race through Peruvian deserts, let this Yamaha Super Ténéré be your medicine.
First produced in 1989, the twin cylinder XTZ 750 Super Ténéré was the big brother of the XTZ 660 Ténéré. Both bikes were named after a notoriously difficult, sandstorm-prone section of the Sahara desert, which featured on the Paris-Dakar route in the 1980s.

This 1992-model XTZ has been reworked by North East Custom, a shop in Padua run by brothers Diego and Riccardo Coppiello. They’re not twins, but it’s impossible to tell the two bearded Italians apart?and they both like anything with knobbly tires.
So although they don’t exclusively focus on off-roaders, they have a real affinity for the genre. (Their stunning Yamaha XT500 restomod was a showstopper at our Wildays stand last year.)
Here, they took everything good about their customer’s Super Ténéré, and amplified it. ?The idea was to bring to life the ?desert spirit?,? explains Diego, ?while adding a fresh touch, to make it more modern and slender.?
The most obvious change is up front. North East have binned the Yamaha’s original fairing in favor of something more svelte, and more akin to modern rally bike designs. The new unit was hand-built using fiberglass, and designed to incorporate the original instruments and headlights, with a new acrylic glass cover to protect the beams...