For those who still remember the smell of a GP grid.

Sitting in a mostly empty bar somewhere in Australia in 1998, Rich Oliver spoke candidly.

The then factory Yamaha Superbike rider had as an audience a couple of motojournalists, and a lot of empty barstools.

While racing, Oliver was renown for his secrets in machine prep, training and even his racing lines. But, on that afternoon in Australia, perhaps it was the alcohol which loosened him up. Or it may have been the subject, one clearly very dear to him.

“On a Superbike, yeah it makes a huge amount of power, almost too much power, but if you look at the engine, it’s this very large block of cylinders, a bank of carbs and everything that comes with it, huge radiators, wide exhausts and stuff like that,” he said describing a period four-stroke Superbike engine.

As he spoke about the Superbike engine, Oliver’s gestures looked like he were describing boulders.

Long an artist, what Rich Oliver saw in a two-stoke was simple beauty, not just what was there, but what was not. He saw a very zen-like answer to the horsepower conundrum.

“A two-stroke,” he continued, “you hang it from an engine stand or put it on an bench and the engine looks more like a sewing machine or a piece of sculpture than it does a powerplant for a racing motorcycle,” he said. “It makes an enormous amount of power for such a small device. Just a little block of aluminum and no wasted strokes.”

Discussing it now, Oliver is slightly more forthcoming about the Yamaha TZ250 he rode, and confesses that his fastest and final 250 had a usable power curve of about three hundred RPM.

“My TZ came with 84 horsepower stock on a dyno,” he says, “and weighed about 225 pounds or so. After extensive work we got it down to 220 or less, and 96-97 hp on the same dyno. After the heavy porting work, my bikes had no low end power, so, to ride it, I would crank in a large amount of throttle opening in the early part of the corner, sometimes as much as half-throttle. Then, as I got further out of the turn, and started to build a drive, I would be rolling the throttle back, then rolling it on again when the engine hit its power band about 11,500 rpm. It would pull hard from 13,500 to 13,800 rpm. Nothing I ever rode made the sound that bike did at 13,500 on perfect jetting. It was a sharp, high-pitched bark that would send chills up your spine.”

The assimilation of Grand Prix racing by four-strokes will be complete in 2012 when Moto3 debuts, killing off the last two-stroke Grand Prix class: 125. There was a time, of course, when all Grand Prix classes were littered exclusively with two-strokes, but the simple fact is that either the world can’t have or doesn’t want a two-stroke future, even though the seeming twenty million poorly-running leaf blowers still in use don’t support that.

And while proponents of two-strokes may rue MotoGP and wish that 1000cc, fuel injected and ECU-controlled two-strokes were raced against the 990s when the class changed formats, it’s a regrettable fact that in today’s world two-strokes hold little relevancy with modern motorcycles. Your average 600 rider on the street has probably not thought about a two-stroke since his dad pushed the PW50 to the back of the garage and slid him on an CRF70. The ratty, loose, clapped out RD350 has gone from being a cast off that few wanted to ride when there were modern alternatives, to a bike that draws crowds at riding areas only because in many instances riders have never seen a two-stroke street motorcycle.

“Nothing I ever rode made the sound that bike did at 13,500 on perfect jetting. It was a sharp, high-pitched bark that would send chills up your spine.” — Rich Oliver

At its zenith, the two-stroke versus four-stroke rivalry in racing bordered on religious factions. A generation of riders dismissed four-strokes as misguided, lumbering plows, but just as many never saw the two-stroke light. Superbike tuning legend Rob Muzzy dismissed two-strokes and said he never worked on one “unless I had to”. Tuning them, to him, was more black art than science.

Irrelevant? Maybe. But one day it may be forgotten how good the modern two-stroke became with forty years of GP development. Two-strokes had come a long way from Jack Findlay’s win (the first GP500 win on a two-stroke—at the Ulster GP in the early ’70s). The final 250 and 125 two-strokes raced in GP were reliable, nasty weapons of speed and like the 500s that were swept aside by MotoGP, solid, capable race bikes.

Ring-ding-ding-ding!