Good News From the Trail
Good News From The Trail
THE LAST WEEK IN OCTOBER was particularly good time for Suzuki. First the company announced its new RMX250 enduro bike to an enthusiastic crowd at its dealer show, and then Randy Hawkins clinched the national enduro championship on a prototype of that very machine. A very good week indeed.
The RMX is the most serious enduro bike Japan has ever produced. It’s basically an RM motocrosser with lights, wider gear ratios, a larger tank and more flywheel weight. In the past few years, manufacturers haven’t built enduro bikes this way because of the EPA noise requirement limiting oif-road motorcycles to less than 82 decibels. That’s a very tough standard—MX bikes don’t even come close, and so technically are confined to closed courses. But the RMX is a modified 250cc motocrosser, and yet it does meet the noise standard.
Sound too good to be true? Well, actually, it is. The RMX, as sold, will be dramatically detuned. The word on the street is that it’s very easy to bring the RMX up to competitive levels of horsepower, but by law, Suzuki can’t tell you how. We can, though, so look for RMX tips right here when Suzuki releases the bike next spring.
