Specifications
MSRP: $7199
Claimed dry weight: 238 lb
One Wet Dog
First Test 2006 Husky TC250
What is it with Huskys and rain? It's not that I can't deal with rain. Actually, when I'm riding off-road, I kind of like it. It lets you know you're outside. It makes you feel the ride. But when I pulled into the Broome-Tioga Sports Center for the motocross portion of our 2006 Husqvarna intro, the wet stuff really began to piss me off.
It's really not fair. I mean honestly, ask yourself how many times you'll have the chance to privately ride Broome-Tioga with only a handful of other lucky souls. For this hombre, the answer's pretty much, well, never. That's why the drippy-drips began to irk me when I sat under the Husqvarna big-rig's awning. That's why I took my sweet-ass time putting on my gear. Somewhere in my life I'd made some poor choices. And now the karmic payback department was making me wait as a perfectly groomed albeit waterlogged national track mocked me in the distance.
Needless to say, as the rain fell and my mood grew ever more glum, the urge to ride simply overcame me. Even though it'd be a soggy, sloppy mess, I was still excited to ride. Besides, I didn't have to wash the bike!
So I took my first spins around the swampy circuit and the mud flew and the bike groaned and the mud flew some more. I had the TC250 pinned. Well, not at first. At first I had it putting, rolling over every little hump and bump, and I was on the lookout out for puddles and the occasional slop-filled crevasses along the way. But eventually such a pace became boring, so I stoked it up a notch and felt something surprisingly good-traction. It got to the point where my gas-to-brake ratio was about normal, and surprisingly, the little Husky thumper chugged along at a pace perfectly suited for the soupy conditions. Also, Broome has some impressive off-camber hills. I can honestly say the 250 from Italy proved torquey enough to get me up and down them all day. But that's about all I can say about my day at Broome-Tioga and the Husky TC250. That is, until a few months later...
Two months had passed, and the TC250 sat in the Dirt Rider cage in dry and sunny Southern California like an unwanted puppy. It'd been thoroughly broken in during the previous flooded flogging and came to us clean as a whistle, patiently waiting for a real moto test. So I took it out to Cahuilla Creek MX Park with a couple of our 250F shootout bikes to see exactly how the Husky would perform without 73 inches of rain to muck with.
The first thing you'll notice when you take the bike off the stand is that she's no lightweight. For '06, Husky lost the electric start that once graced its motocross models, added a kickstarter and managed to cut about nine pounds. But guess what? It's still too heavy. At 231 pounds, it's the heaviest moto-specific 250F in our stable-outweighing the next heaviest by more than 10 pounds and the lightest (the CRF250R) by a whopping 15 pounds. This proved to be the biggest downfall of the Italian design. The weight isn't high and awkward as to throw off the handling so much, it's lower and deeper as if it's under a different degree of gravitational pull.