Who KILLED The 2 Stroke Dirt Bike?

if you've ever heard this sound [Music] then you know that smell the smell of a perfectly tuned 32-1 crisp burning two smoker and if you know what a two-stroke motorcycle smells like then you know that power a power that is frightening yet rapturous a power that is frantic but harmonious the power that combines the perfect balance between chaos and peace hmm there's only a few things in life that are more orgasmic than riding a perfectly tuned two-stroke dirt bike so who are responsible for killing off this amazing machine but more importantly we're going to talk about who kept it alive and because of that how today the two-stroke dirt bike is making an amazing comeback every story has an origin a specific Moment In Time usually the perfect moment in time where someone or something laid the groundwork for the future to change and for our story today we're going to discuss three main culprits that contributed to the demise of the two-stroke dirt bike each playing their significant part in this role now some did this on purpose some were uninformed and some were just downright stupid so our Three Stooges for today's conversation will be number one Yamaha motorcycles who I believe did this on purpose number two the American motorcyclist Association further referred to here as the AMA who was either uninformed or just playing along and number three the state of California who is just downright stupid let's begin with Yamaha motorcycles and it's 1997 prototype yzm-400 F which I will refer to in this video as the yz400 not to confuse it with the actual yz400 production model that would hit dealership floors a few years later by now most of you are aware of the fairy tale story of the 1997 Las Vegas Supercross where Doug Henry piloted his experimental yz400 four-stroke to Victory against the almighty and previously dominant two-strokes proving once and for all that four-stroke motorcycles were far superior Machinery to their two-stroke counterparts and from that moment on Two Strokes would cease to exist well that's a great story but it's only partially true here's what really happened in 1996 armed with a team of lawyers with sheets of pollution stats rolls of sketched engine drawings on plotter paper and a posse of mathematicians Yamaha approaches the AMA with a goal to persuade them or bully them or pay them off however you want to look at the this to allow four-stroke dirt bikes to race in the AMA professional series for quote development purposes because at the time they were not allowed in this conversation Yamaha tells the AMA that due to the characteristics of a two-stroke engine some of the fresh charge that is expelled from the cylinder into the expansion chamber is then drawn back into the cylinder and because of this it is believed that the two-stroke engine is 1.6 times more powerful than a four-stroke per unit of displacement this led to the calculation that making a four-stroke Engine with power that is equivalent to a 250cc two-stroke would need to be 1.6 times the displacement which comes to 400 CC's 250 times 1.6 equals 400. sure whatever anyway the AMA says sounds good to us go build your four-stroke now back to the phrase development purposes AMA Supercross and AMA National Motocross championships only allow production-based models to compete in the series so basically what that means is that the bike you're seeing on track that's being raced by your favorite Rider is very close to the same motorcycle you should be able to buy on Monday morning at your local showroom obviously the manufacturers can modify these bikes to certain degrees but basically what you're seeing on track has to be in production and things like the chassis and the casings have to remain stock Yamaha knows that the Achilles heel of a four-stroke which is the same Achilles heel that four strokes have today is weight Yamaha then recommends to the AMA that the yz400 be allowed to compete and enter races under the development purpose rule which exempts them from having to abide by any of the previously mentioned production rules and the AMA grants it to them this allows Yamaha to build a special titanium swing arm frame and numerous other components that would not be legal on the 250cc two-strokes by the time it's all said and done Doug Henry's YZ 400 bike that he lined up on the gate with at the 1997 Las Vegas Supercross is a 50 horsepower 252 pound dirt bike now to put this into perspective my 2022 crf450rl that has 25 years worth of advanced technology in it only puts out 47 horsepower after it's been modified and weighs 290 Pounds Doug Henry's old yz400 was lighter and faster than my crf450rl that is 25 years newer so basically the AMA gave Yamaha the green light to build the ultimate no-cost barred cheater bike using any parts that they deemed necessary while nobody knows the true cost on what it took to build Doug Henry's yz400 it's believed that that motorcycle cost in excess to 550 000 to produce so while this story sounds awesome and is a very significant part of American racing history and takes nothing away from the greatness that Doug Henry was as a writer without the massive displacement advantage in the free reign to modify the yz400 without any ramifications the four-stroke was given a serious competitive advantage over its two-stroke counterparts and without that Advantage the bike probably would have failed I believe Yamaha with its sophisticated set of Engineers knew that the CC equation math was sketchy at best and saw a way to game the AMA a and I got to give him props for doing that now let's talk about the American motorcyclist Association here for just a second as for the AMA they were either extremely naive and fell victim to the dazzling mathematics of Yamaha or they knew that it was unfair But ultimately wanted two strokes out of their racing series and this would be the perfect platform to put pressure on the other manufacturers and force them into building four strokes I'll let you decide as Sun Tzu says in the Art of War Supreme Excellence consists in Breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting you see the AMA is the largest and most prolific racing body in America and the rules they set forth are adopted by almost every other Racing Organization in America professional Racers don't have to buy their motorcycles but high-ranking amateurs and other amateur Racers do and because amateurs don't have the Deep Pockets of the manufacturers in order to be as competitive as you possibly can be while making it as cost effective as you possibly can it's wise to start with the very best platform that's available and work your way up from there if your local Racing Organization and the AMA is going to allow four-stroke dirt bikes that have 150 cc displacement advantage to enter your race class you're going to get smoked like David Pingree once said it's like bringing a sport to a gunfight this instantly had an effect on two-stroke sails also this made the only choice for amateurs a Yamaha motorcycle so immediately the other manufacturers Honda Suzuki Kawasaki had to immediately start building one in fear of losing market share to Yamaha as with all bureaucracies like this when it's all said and done it's we the consumer that loses the most and in this case we the consumer were left to absorb the high costs of four-stroke development you see a two-stroke engine has less moving parts and it's cheaper to build it's easier to assemble therefore it becomes cheaper to buy to give you an example of this in 1999 I bought a brand new KX250 just like the one Jeff Emig was riding off the showroom floor for 4 100 United States dollars so factoring in inflation that forty one hundred dollars would roughly be 7 326 dollars today so let me ask you can you buy a brand new 450 race bike off to showroom floor today for 7 326 and the answer is no because four-stroke engines cost more to develop costs more to build what we're left with today our twelve thousand dollar dirt bikes another significant loss to the consumer is maintenance while two-stroke engines do require more routine maintenance anyone with half-assed mechanical skills can easily work on these a top end replacement on a two-stroke can take less than an hour and back in the day it wasn't uncommon to see someone replacing their top in between motos with today's four-stroke engines it takes a fair amount of mechanical know-how and about three to five hours to change the same top end not to mention it's a lot more expensive to purchase the parts so this has taken an already expensive Sport and just blown the cost through the roof and this hurts everyone because higher costs mean there are less teams less teams means there are less Riders and worse for young kids out there it's harder to participate in the sport of motocross than it ever has been it's just a sad situation all the way around now let's move on to the state of California because for every story you need a good political twist California is the largest state in America and in 1997 the California air resources board which will be referred to here as carb how ironic created what we know as a red sticker green sticker program as stated on carb's website the California air resources board first adopted ohrv exhaust standards in 1994. in part to reduce emissions from high emitting two-stroke ohrvs in 1997 prior to implementation of the exhaust standards stakeholders expressed concern regarding the availability and performance of compliant ohrvs and access to practice areas in 1998 after extensive collaboration with the industry the red sticker program was created in layman terms the California green sticker indicates that the vehicles passed emission requirements and it can operate on public lands that are open to Motor Vehicles throughout the entire year a red sticker is an off-road vehicle that fails to meet emission requirements a la two-stroke these high performance machines are only able to operate on public lands at certain times of the year which is usually from October to March now I lived in California for over 20 years and I lived in California during this time and I'll tell you why this is important if you take a look at this highway that runs from Sacramento down into San Diego this is Interstate 5. back in the late 90s I would guess that California had roughly 30 million inhabitants and I would say that 70 percent of those inhabitants or 21 million people live west of that I-5 freeway and probably 15 million or more of those inhabitants are condensed into a few metropolitan areas now west of the I-5 there are some huge and very iconic off-highway riding areas up towards the San Francisco San Jose area you have Hollister Hills you also have Pismo Beach outside of Los Angeles you have Gorman or Hungry Valley and down towards San Diego you have Coral Canyon now there's a lot more off Highway areas in between that but these are some of the more predominant well-known areas so there are a lot of people who live in this area that own a lot of dirt bikes that just lost six months worth of riding access to these locations leaving the only place that you could legally ride your two-stroke dirt bike would either be on a race track or you had to go out into the desert that was four to five hours away so it became very inconvenient to own a two-stroke but it gets worse than that because the only time these OHV areas would be open to the red sticker Two Strokes is during the winter season so basically California is telling you that if you want to ride your dirt bike for the other six months of the year you have to go out to Death Valley in July in the sweltering 105 plus degree temperatures so what in turn this does is it eliminates more than 60 percent of your riding areas making it very inconvenient to own a two-stroke dirt bike I could go on forever about my personal views towards this BS bureaucracy but I understand that every political Outlet needs a scapegoat and for car that became two-stroke dirt bikes I guess when you hear a whiny dirt bike that's spitting a little smoke out of its exhaust you target that as the killer of the planet while you turn a blind eye to the ships airplanes diesel engines and the pollution that's generated from providing basic resources to the 40 million inhabitants but that's another story altogether also I think it's stupid to say the two-stroke dirt bikes pollute the world more than four strokes just because they release more CO2 from their exhaust while not taking into consideration the environmental impact or pollution that would go into making a four-stroke engine over a two-stroke because a four-stroke has more parts that need to be machine mined and milled then transported I mean how much are we really saving here now understand I'm not bashing four strokes I have one and I love it what I'm saying is the basis of this argument is dumb many have blamed the EPA for this issue but truthfully in this case they had little to do with it because they didn't care whether you were riding a two-stroke or a four-stroke they don't want you riding motorcycles period And while they have done their fair share of creating unfair motorcycle emission standards that have accelerated the cost to us at the time they didn't have any restrictions for off-road vehicles so in this story it becomes the classic case of cutting them off at the knees just like Sun Tzu would say in The Art of War hold out baits to entice the enemy feign disorder then crush him you create a scapegoat two-stroke dirt bikes to politicians in the naive general public can get behind blame everything on them every chance you get and this will also distract people from who the real enemy is so they can operate uninhibitedly take away the manufacturer's incentives for racing Two Strokes at the highest level of racing and they'll stop developing reduce significant amounts of riding a land available to the tax paying public and Weekend Warriors and they're going to stop buying them from here it just becomes a simple house of cards you don't have to technically ban anything and years later the politicians look like Heroes for following through on their promises they get their votes get reelected cater to their interests make their millions of dollars as they fly around the world in their High polluting private jumbo Jets while some poor kid in Bakersfield California has nowhere to ride his dirt bike again as Sun Tzu would say in The Art of War it's only one who's thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on however there is one manufacturer sure they didn't get the memo or they took this opportunity and seized it with both hands and that's KTM KTM is a European company and Europeans love trials and Enduro forms of motorcycling discipline in this area the lightweight characteristics of a two-stroke and the power is preferred over the four strokes even to this day so KTM kept developing Two Strokes while the Japanese manufacturers pretty much left them fast forward 20 years later and to this day more than 75 percent of all two-stroke dirt bikes that are sold worldwide belong to KTM or its sister Brands like Husqvarna and gas gas but it doesn't just stop there the European continent owns the two-stroke dirt bike space the remaining 25 percent of these two-stroke sales are divided up between other European manufacturers like TM beta and shurco also Sun Tzu would say the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself now I know many riders have their issues with KTMs but we should be thankful that they kept the two-stroke dream alive and we should be more thankful that they continue to pour resources in money into the development of two-stroke engines The Late Model KTM Huskies TBI and TPI injected models are cleaner burning more reliable and more potent than the older two-stroke models by a long shot and because of this two strokes are now starting to make a comeback and with a surge of interest in other forms of motorcycling discipline like the erzberg rodeo the Tennessee knockout Enduro Cross Red Bull straight Rhythm and the two-stroke Nationals we're seeing more and more popularity minute by minute for two strokes and that's a good thing the main takeaway of this video isn't about two strokes versus four strokes and which one is better I've been fortunate enough to own both of them and there are areas which each one of them cells there are times where I really love the torque power and lug ability of my four-stroke but there's other times I prefer that flickability and that playful nature of how I feel I'm on the Ragged Edge when I ride a two-stroke there's room in our world for both of these bikes what this video is really about is politics because the same organizations that killed off the two strokes are now coming after your single cylinder four strokes I mean look at how Honda had to hack the engine on the 450 RL just to get it to pass emissions and with each passing year it just gets worse so I guess in closing it would be appropriate to finish this video off with a quote from Sun Tzu's Art of War where he says the whole secret lies in confusing your enemy so that they cannot fathom your real intent and right now goons and gals we are being confused and tricked because two-stroke dirt bikes are not our enemy four-stroke dirt bikes are not our enemy this is right

Channel: Born A Goon

Views: 536,587

Keywords: adventurebikes, best used motorcycle, best used motorcycles to buy, honda, ducati, yamaha, triumph, KTM, off-road, adventure, motorcycles, used motorcycles, beginer motorcycles, beginner bikes, honda transalp 750, 2023 KTM890, World Raid Yamaha, Born A Goon, stark, stark varg, electric motorcycles, ktm 400, honda transalp, KOVE rally, dual dport motorcycles, best of 2023, adventure motorcycles 2023, 2023 dirt bikes, best beginner motorcycles of 2023, dangerous motorcycles

Id: PSJC29LPj9s

Length: 19min 31sec (1171 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 10 2023