VOL. 52 ISSUE 46 NOVEMBER 17, 2015 P67
YAMAHA BRINGS ANOTHER TWO-STROKE
TO THE OFF-ROAD TABLE
BY THE CN STAFF
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KIT PALMER
WE WANT,
WE GET
O
ften times the motorcycle
OEMs (original equip-
ment manufactures) are
criticized for not listening to their
customers. The Japanese OEMs
are usually the biggest offend-
ers, mainly because they are the
biggest motorcycle companies
and the bigger the company, the
harder it is to get things done.
Yamaha, however, is certainly get-
ting better when it comes to giving
its customers what they want and
the new Yamaha YZ250X is good
example of that, granted it took a
while.
When Japanese two-stroke
motocross bikes went away, so
did Japanese two-stroke off-road
bikes. While it might be true that
the Japanese OEMs weren't offer-
ing two-stroke off-road bikes at the
time of the four-stroke onslaught
(and even well before then), we
were building them out of their
MX bikes once we got them home
and were fairly content in doing
that. When thumpers took over,
of the four Japanese OEMs, only
Yamaha kept two-strokes MX bikes
in their line after listening to their
customers, and even their rival
customers, complain about the
now lack of two-strokes MX and
off-road bikes on the market, only
KTM and a few other smaller Euro
manufactures continued to build
either two-strokes off-road or mo-
tocross bikes with good success.
Many years later, after seeing the
popularity of two-stroke remain
strong and maybe even growing a
bit, Yamaha was finally convinced
that people still love and want
two-stroke off-road bikes—and
evidently always will—and chose to
get back in the two-stroke off-road
game again. (Yamaha did make a
two-stroke WR250 in the mid-to-
late 1990s.)
Not only is the
YZ250X easy to ride
but easy to maintain
and live with. The
YZ already has a
great reputation for
being reliable.
