The Yamaha is sold in a different state completely. The blue bike has a racier motor harnessed with a system of restrictors that can be removed if you desire full performance, changing the bike into a closed-course setting. These changes may or may not matter depending on where you ride. Not happy to ride the WR450F in a stock state, since it performed more like a 250F in terms of power, we incrementally did the minimum tweaks necessary to get it running as it should; we'll call it a commonsense setting. Common sense also included installing hand guards on all the bikes, because we like them!
Kawasaki KLX450R vs. Yamaha WR450F vs. Honda CRF450X vs. KTM 450 EXC If you're in the market for a 450cc four-stroke off-road bike, there couldn't be a better time or a hotter class to be looking at. With the arrival of the Kawasaki KLX-R to the already performance-stacked class of Yamaha WRs, KTMs and Honda CRF-Xs-not even counting Huskys and Husabergs, Gas Gases and TMs-the off-road market is getting full. And holding your breath only a little longer will yield a new Suzuki and BMW on the market, as well as a rumored Buell. At this rate, it doesn't matter what color or style of performance you crave-it will be available, and our next Torture Test will address this head-on.
But for this comparo, we took the heavy hitters and the new challengers out to the trails to see what you can have right now.
A Day in the Dez Our first group outing was to the desert. Where better to get familiar with these bikes than a place where they can roam and use the power they possess? For a lack of a better term, a place where we could "let them eat." If power was really supreme, then we could go nuts with jetting and airbox mods to all of the bikes. Still, you'll be surprised at what we found. Even in its showroom-stock configuration, the Honda was the fastest where it counted. It squirted out of the hole and pulled hard right through the powerband, beating out all of the other bikes in roll-ons and straight-up drag races on a consistent basis. Who says this bike needs cams or $1000 in motor work to run with the others? The CRF-X has torque to chug the bike a gear high and will spin up smoothly or abruptly-you decide with the throttle. It does a lot of this courtesy of shorter gearing, for sure, and only loses out when top speed comes into play.
Simply put, you can look at this test in a number of ways. Off-road bikes are tasked with doing many things. Depending on your location and its regulations, some bikes may be appropriate and others just won't work. To help, we tried to evaluate these bikes in the most appropriate context, meaning as close to box-stock as possible, while still getting what we felt was acceptable performance out of them. That said, we didn't modify, change, tweak or remove anything we didn't have to. Only the stuff that needed it, and only after we tried them stock.
Out of the Box If this were a test right off the dealer's showroom floor, there are only two bikes to choose from based solely on performance. And only one if you need to be street-licensed to ride where you want, a big concern for a lot of riders whose states have stringent regulations or very limited OHV access. The Honda CRF450X and the Kawasaki KLX450R are the only bikes of the fleet that run 100 percent acceptably from the second you buy them. You can ride the CRF-X and KLX-R anywhere OHVs are legal and have a great time doing it. In fact, for the duration of this comparison, we didn't touch a thing on these two. The Red and Green guys have figured out how to get full-throttle actuation, minimal sound output and reduced emissions-all mandated by our government-into a package that needs nothing more than a rider atop the bike.
In top speed, the uncorked Yamaha pulls the CRF-X. The WR, unrestricted but still lean, is ever so close to the CRF-X everywhere. You can still step it up with the GYTR jetting, but so could every bike in this test if we wanted to play Dr. Jetting. Testing the WR, we found it smoother than both the CRF-X and the KLX: semi-electric-like with surge available anytime with a twist of the throttle. The WR does not seem to have the grunt or torque of the Honda or KTM, bikes on which you feel the pulse of each power stroke; it prefers to blend those strokes together into a creamier delivery of wheel-twisting force. And when the WR revs out, it really revs and stretches its legs even past the KTM and its tall gears.
KTM chose a much different path, the one to street-legality. In doing this, the Orange company took a fully capable dirt bike (the XC-W) and tweaked and tuned it into the EXC with a few simple changes that made the bike fully street-legal-and off-road-legal to boot. As such, the bike would have a few hiccups if it were taken onto difficult trails. Mainly the incredibly tall gearing and the lean carburetion: small prices to pay if you need a license plate. We rode the KTM box-stock for only a little while before easily "reconverting" it, step by step, into an XC-W.