Husky TC250 Web Impression

The international motorcycle press recently converged upon Tenerife, Canary Islands. They were there for serious business-the revolutionary Husky TC250 world launch. Before their time was over, they would enjoy clean bikes a clean community and a slew of seriously dirty one-handers polluting the air above Tenerife's Motocross365.com facility.

I can say "international" because Jonty Edmunds was there. That's how I know it's international. He shows up. And like the famous biblical line in Hollywood's Tombstone film says, "...hell [sometimes] follows with him." You've seen his photography and words in Dirt Rider but you don't usually get to see him aiming a fire extinguisher at your face at three in the morning. I have.

Luckily, the American motorcycle press got there a couple days earlier than the rest of the world-including the Australians, which can and usually are a handful.

We were there for the Husky TC250. The X Light. The bike with two names. X Light is the second name. Husky TC250 is the first. And combined they mean light, powerful, new and cool.

Let's do some math. Husqvarna claims this bike weighs 214 pounds (dry). That's light. Really light. And the bike could actually weigh that little. I didn't have my scales with me to check. The last husky 250 motocross bike we weighed was 231 pounds. And that was after they ditched the once-standard electric starter. Knocking 16 pounds off a model is impressive. Math is fun.

A lot of this lightness has to do with a diminutive motor. The new compact four stroke is a shadow of its former Italian self. Husky says it weighs 48 pounds. We saw this motor two years ago in some secret photos that we leaked to the magazine. But it seems it's taken its time getting here. Even so, it's here and in an all-new bike. It's fun to look at the bike from the side while trying to imagine what you could throw between the top of the valve cover and the bottom of the gas tank. A Chihuahua comes to mind.

New TC250 stuff includes a redesigned frame with new angles everywhere, a new subframe, new 50mm Marzocchi fork tubules and a newly updated Sachs shock. Plus, there are new beefy brake rotors and powerful Brembo parts with which to grab said brake rotors. There are new side panels, radiator shrouds and a new seat. There's a new air box and swingarm and new everything else.

I was hoping all this new stuff truly meant a new bike. Like, not like the old bike.

Traditional knee-jerk Husky reactions include heavy-feeling bikes with sweet stability and slow-to-go motors. They go fast. They just don't go fast, fast. They climb their way up to top speed instead of jumping there and when approaching an upward pointy wall of dirt with a gap on the other side jumping is more fun and much more relaxing than hopefully climbing fast enough.

The bottom line is this new Husky is just similar enough to the old bikes to maintain the stable goodness and top-end rip. And it's just different enough to pump out a more-confident level of immediate power.

It's still not the class champion in out-of-the-hole performance, but it is a good top end performer and a torquey one at that. Likely, this has to do with the entire package being more refined than previous version more than the power prowess of the new motor.

If you want to go really fast on the new Husky TC250, you're going to want to keep the throttle pinned wide open and ride it like a 125. Which, conveniently, is a lot of fun.

Motocross 365 (www.motocross365.com) is a cool track with floaty table tops and jumpy sections separated by long climbs and sweeping turns. It's also about as flat as a pancake between obstacles and I counted four braking bumps on the whole track-which I easily steered around. In these conditions the Marzocchi/Sachs combo seemed ample enough. Performance was plush and the bottoming resistance from landings was better than decent. It seemed the faster you went, the less the fork liked jump faces and it actually bottomed more here than on my more-than-one missed landing.

The real negatives felt on the bike center around the pits. The bike was incredibly hard to start. The hot start button located on the carburetor is a bit old school and the kick-starter gear ratio is off or the compression ratio inside the cylinder is really high because it's a bear to kick. And it kicks back! It needs a timeout and an attitude adjustment because once it's running it's like a teddy bear.

By far the best aspect of the new Husqvarna TC250 Motocross bike is the light in-air feel. It was fun. And with lap times under two minutes, the American press corps had plenty of airtime. Four of us, all competing publications of different sorts, had epic battle after epic battle in the air above the track. It was a war of one-handers and I think we all won.

On the next day, we invited the Englishman Jonty Edmunds, a few of his rather cool countrymates, our new Australian chap Ben Foster (Dirt Action Magazine-Australia) and journalists from about 100 other countries to play. They didn't do many one-handers, so but someone should tell France and Italy that Americans are supposed to be good at whips, not them, because they were throwing silly, silly, silly whips all over the place. We really need to practice. Good thing it wasn't a whip war. It was a one-hander war and we won.

We're patiently waiting for production versions of the TC250 to land in the United States. We want to ride it on some bumps and weigh that sucker! Luckily, we have a slew of cool photos from our days in the Canary Islands to hold us off. When we get the bikes, you'll know about it here on www.dirtrider.com. Or you can just look in the sky for a sick one-hander. Better yet, do some of your own and send photos to me: jesse.ziegler@sorc.com