Budget Off-Road Race Bike

Budget Off-Road Race Bike

Looking for the most off-road fun per dollar?

It is hard to beat Yamaha’s venerable two-stroke YZ250X. Light, fast, and easy to live with. This bike is a blast for the racer and the weekend warrior alike.

A legendary motor, a wide ratio five-speed, with great suspension straight out of the box. This bike just needs a few mods to become a real contender against much higher-priced machines.

Slap on a set of handguards, choose your favorite tires, and you have a bike that is plenty fast and capable for a weekend of riding with your buddies or racing your local hare scramble. But out of the box, the bike is going to give up some ground to its higher-priced brethren.

The question is, how to make this bike better for the average intermediate and novice rider/racer and still clock in at a budget-friendly price point?

In the following series of Mods and Upgrades, we are going to attempt to get the 250X to live up to its full potential. Good enough to get the average hard-charging intermediate rider to the front of their class by being smoother, and more trackable. Less tiring to ride. More predictable and less likely to get us into trouble.

As to whether or not we are still more budget-friendly than the other bikes on the starting line (think KTM and Beta for example) that remains to be seen.

It should be fun trying!