remember when yamaha offered both the mx and yz?
gimme a mx250f please!
all the suspension of the yzf with a reliable mx style trailbike engine.
got my hacksaw ready, tt500 motor's in the shed, now where's that blown up engined yz450f on ebay?
I've been thinking about something very similar, everytime I see a YZ-F250 with a dead engine on EBay... Just add a 300cc kitted TTR250 engine and we'd be laughing.
Surely the market is there for such a beast to be produced by the factories?
In more general terms, the capacities are wrong - remember back when you could run a 400F against a 250T? Essentially, they give the 4-strokes an equvilance factor of 0.625 (ie: if the class limit is 250T then 250/0.625 = 400cc for a four stroke) - this seemed to work well - as each type of bike was pretty evenly matched over a variety of tracks/conditions.
Then - while the four-strokes were still getting faster - it got bumped to 0.55, and they allowed the lites a 0.50 equlivance factor - madness!
The noise thing is an interesting, and unexpected by-product. Booming four-stroke engine noise travels further than the higher-pitched two-stroke noise, so just when we'd started to get the noise thing under control, we went and buggered it up for ourselves.
The new performance four-strokes scare me. We talk about putting a piston into a new style 2-stroke once per season, but I was talking to a bloke (Mick Wating, the guy who runs the Full-Bore riding park) the other day. He has a 2000 YZ250 that's been ridden a
lot and still has the original piston... Yes it's rattly, but he reckons it still starts first kick and goes well.
When I can buy a four-stroke that can go close to that, in terms of power, weight, real world noise output and reliablilty, then I'm seriously interested.
Until then, my four-stroke ownership is going to be limited to old trailbikes.