If you were to look to racing results, especially in outdoor motocross, to guide you in your dirt bike buying decisions, there would be a pretty heavy bias toward going green. Maybe even more so if you’re looking at a 250F. Kawasaki, specifically the Monster Energy/Pro Circuit team, has been on a tear this year, [...]
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You’d be hard-pressed to see the changes Yamaha made to the 2008 YZ450F. Aside from the obviously shorter muffler it’d take setting a ’07 and ’08 side by side to give up the visual clues that are strikingly inconspicuous. However, it doesn’t take but one lap on the new bike to feel the changes, which [...]
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Top-of-the-line motocross bikes get pretty significant improvements each year, and every few years they undergo a total redo. Honda’s first CRF450 was introduced in 2002 to stellar reviews and many “bike of the year” awards, solidifying the validity of the 450cc four-stroke motocross market. It received small upgrades in 2003 and ’04 until an all-new [...]
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If you remember from the first update (September ’07) we had some issues with the charging and battery components on our “new” KLX. So we never got the battery issue sorted out. One of the problems was we’d stuck a higher-wattage bulb in the headlight and that prevented the bike from putting the necessary charge [...]
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Is this the future of trail riding? Is this the cheater bike that’s going to turn EnduroCross upside-down? Have we been missing the boat on how to make trailbikes since the craze of long-travel suspension machines led us astray? Or have the trials guys had it all along and been holding out? Well, it was [...]
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It was only logical, and since this bike has been available in Japan for over a year now, the CRF230L is now here in the United States. Are there lines at the dealers waiting to see this bike? No. Is it breaking new technological ground? No. Is it filling a hole in the Honda lineup? [...]
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Long-Term TestingLong Haul Wrap-Up2008 Kawasaki KLX450One of the requirements for borrowing a DR Long Haul bike is that you have to treat it and take care of it like your own bike; not just go out and thrash it like it was someone’s bike you’d just stolen. Well, as much as I’d tried to screen [...]
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Being “middle of the road” can mean a lot of things. It’s a term for average or just placing something in the center of two extremes. With a shrunken class, the Yamaha YZ250 has adopted this place in class among its competitors, the Suzuki RM250 and KTM 250 SX. Call it a middleman.What the two-stroke [...]
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2008Four-fifty off-road bikes are some of the most versatile, do-all megamachines you can get your hands on. Most are based off of each company’s full-on MX 450s, then tuned for off-road use and set up to meet standards and regulations for off-road machines. Yet it’s still surprising how many riders make the mistake of buying [...]
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From The EditorThere are two questions I get asked a lot, both the same question asked by totally different groups of people.“What kind of bike do you ride?” comes from someone who may’ve just found out I ride motorcycles.You want to know what the problem is with this question? I can’t answer it. Think about [...]
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If you’re a motorcycle rider, then more than likely you work on your ride. Some guys do it out of a rusty, old two-drawer toolbox inherited from Dad, a mismatch of metric and SAE sockets with a rusty crescent wrench to the rescue in the tough times all in a tin can of a dirt-floored [...]
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Caught you! Did you really think it was true: a new bike for $1500? Well, we don’t lie here and we’re also trying to squeak by in tough times, so we know the pinch of looking at that $7000-plus price tag of a new bike. What we did was take one of our old test [...]
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This could be the year of the playbike. With the Suzuki DR-Z70 entering the market, Kawasaki coming with two new models and Yamaha doing a heavy revamp to all of its TT-Rs, getting riders into dirt biking is the name of the game. With a lot of choices out there, Dirt Rider took one of [...]
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I was born into a dirt bike
These days when kids make the jump
HILLSDALE, Mich., (Nov. 7, 2011) – It’s
This is how Carson and his friends
