Ask the Editors: How Important is Handling?

By Jason Giacchino - April 23, 2023

A Honda 250R only by name.

Dear ATVC: I read with great interest your look back at the Kawasaki Tecates and wondered about something. See, I was pretty young when the 2-strokes disappeared but remember clearly my local track’s gate filled with Honda 250Rs and nothing else for years (all the way until the race 4-stroke machines came to be). I didn’t even think any other brands even made 250cc 2-strokes. Now I hear the Tecate-4 was even faster than the Honda 250R. Why were they so unpopular?

This is a surprisingly good question and the answer, at least the majority of it, can be summed up in a single word: handling.

While it’s true a bone stock Kawasaki Tecate-4 offered a surprisingly potent engine, the chassis was quite ill equipped to turn those ponies into results. Beginning with the rider positioning and ending with the limitations of the suspension itself, amateur racers looking to compete with the Honda 250R on the track often ended up having to spend thousands of dollars modifying the chassis. This is a bigger disadvantage than it seems as putting even a fraction of that type of budget into a machine with solid handling can net a fire-breathing engine. In other words, it’s easier to make a good handling machine faster than it is a fast one good handling.

That explanation is adequate in explaining why the Honda 250R was the most popular of the three major entries (the other being the Suzuki LTR250 Quadracer and of course the Kawasaki Tecate-4) but what followed was a long period where all of the manufacturers (even Honda) bailed on ATV racing.

This meant if a quad racer wanted to get into the sport, he either had to buy an older machine and modify it to compete, or, and this is what you remember seeing in your youth, build up a machine from scratch.

And if you were going to use the geometry numbers from any of the three choices, it would only make sense to build your chassis around the most popular, best handling machine of the trio. So while it would seem Honda 250Rs were the only choice for a solid decade, in truth those machines contained 250R DNA but were often one-off custom quads – built up using custom frames, aftermarket suspension, big bore engines, performance exhausts, lightweight hubs etc. Even the plastic wasn’t OEM Honda. Essentially they were to the actual TRX250R what a NASCAR Chevy is to the Camaro in your neighbor’s garage.

In 1999 change was in the air. The racing world in other sports was converting to performance 4-strokes and when Honda released its TRX400EX, they made the brilliant move of copying their own legendary 250R geometry. From there the rise of the 450s would follow and there would be 10 of those to choose from before long, each designed for racing. And thus the era of true stock ATV race equipment was reborn for the first time since those 250cc 2-strokes of the late 1980s.