Yamaha Motorcycle Oil Starvation Problem

When a Yamaha motorcycle is starved for oil at high RPMS, where do you look to find the problem? Is it the oil filter? Maybe it's the oil cooler that's starving the bike.

Partzilla's Yamaha expert John Talley goes live on our YouTube channel every Friday at 3pm Eastern to answer your motorcycle repair questions. In this session, John addresses an oil starvation problem for a Yamaha R1 bike.

Yamaha Motorcycle Starved for Oil

I have a 2010 Yamaha R1 and the engine blew. It was starved for oil at high RPMs. Could this be an oil pump issue, or the oil filter not having enough flow or both? 

John Talley: Well, more than likely it was an oil flow issue, but let me ask a couple of questions or give you something to think about. I ran into this on an R1 a little bit older than yours. The guy had just wasted his clutch. He just blew it out and didn’t do a good enough job of cleaning it out. He rebuilt his engine and yet it still starved the cams, and then chaos ensued and it spun a couple of bearings. It turned out to be there was an oil cooler down on the front side of the engine, and it had such small passageways at lower RPMS that you wouldn’t notice it. But at higher RPMs, there was too much back pressure there and not enough flow up top and boom, there goes the engine. So what saved the new build was being very thorough and cleaning every single part of the engine, including that oil cooler, which was the part that brought it to its knees. So be aware of that, especially if you’ve fried your clutch, and if the plate’s completely broke down and wiped away, all of that material is still flying around your engine and you’ve got to get it out. So this may have been caused by a not-so-thorough cleaning of the oil passageways.

Watch the video below to see how to change the oil in a Yamaha YZFR1 motorcycle.

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