Is 250cc big enough?

[warewolf]

what sort of k's would a WR450 get before needing a major rebuild. Think mainly transit road miles , gravel bashing , trail riding and possibly the odd event.

anyone got one set up for adventure / dual purpose riding ?

Yamaha WR450F Adventure Bike

[warewolf]

Yeah I'm loving the idea of a 450 EXC too but being a total ADV noob, am a bit worried that the extra grunt may be detrimental to my health when the going gets tight. The WR seems pretty easy to handle due to it's tame power delivery.

Smaller lighter more manageable bike is always a bonus when starting out. When the WR250F was first released, I was in that market so talked to every rider I saw. Almost all of them had traded down from a wr450F and found they could go hard all day on the 250, get up it big time for big grins, generally thrash it about, and many thought they were faster on it; whereas the 450 beat them up in short order.

While on the 450 route, Yamaha had previously sold the WR450 road legal here but they sold in such pathetic numbers that it's discontinued.

I'm surprised, I see lots of road legal ones, but then again I'm kinda looking from within this niche. I 'spose I also see shitloads unregistered at trail rides, too. There no competition so that's no hardship. I was told by a Honda dealer recently that the CRF-X isn't road legal here because "the police don't like them because they can't catch them, so they had the LTSA ban them" quote-unquote.

NZ is a different market anyway. Most enduro bikes have all the road legal bits stripped off and get used off road only. NZ is following the yanks with their MXer with wide-range gearbox and lights, rather than full-on road-legal enduro bikes. To that end, recently we've seen the Husky TXC (? not sure) and the XC-W KTMs coming in as well as the EXC... which I reckon is the death knell for the EXC. Is different to Aussie where you can't ride in a forest unless you are road legal - enduros are really big sellers, often taking half the top-ten spots for overall sales.