Kawasaki KLX 250R

Review

Can you be successful if you have only two faults? Sure: George Washington was a liar with wooden teeth. Abraham Lincoln had a lot of warts and couldn't grow a decent moustache. Rondo is double ugly.
In the case of the Kawasaki KLX250 we will expose its two faults right up front. It costs too much (way too much) and it's not easy to start (not hard, but not easy). In every other way, the bike is outstanding. It brings new standards of excellence to the little four-stroke class and makes all the other bikes (well, the other bike) seem dated and obsolete.

WHY IT'S HERE

The little KLX had every right to be a disaster. After all, it looks a lot like the KLX650 introduced last year. There had been a ready-made crowd of riders just dying to spend money on the 650, but the bike was a big disappointment. It was unreliable, overweight and boiled like a tea kettle. Americans put their wallets away quickly. However, we kept seeing photos of another, downsized KLX from Japan and hearing tantalizing rumors.

Last spring, the Dirt Bike crew got its hands on the Japanese KLX250. One had been imported by Rob Barnum so that he could get a jump in the aftermarket manufacturing game, and we sneaked out and rode it for a day. We liked it, and so did everyone else who rode it.
So U.S. Kawasaki execs had to risk their corporate necks on another KLX. They decided to go for it, despite bad currency exchange rates and high production costs. They knew the bike was going to be expensive, but if it were as good as everyone had said, it might be worth it. So here we are in '94 with a $4700 250cc four-stroke on our hands.

WHAT'S UNDER THE HOOD

Technically, the KLX is several steps more advanced (and more complicated) than a Honda XR250. The Honda is air-cooled, the Kaw is liquid-cooled. The Honda has a single overhead cam, the Kawasaki has double overhead cams. The Honda engine was designed in the early '80s. and there has been a lot of four-stroke development since then (mostly spin-offs from the road racing world). The Kawasaki has things that you see on more advanced engines, like very steep valve angles and a fairly flat combustion chamber.

The Kawasaki also has a centrifugal compression release that holds one exhaust valve open until the engine gets up to idle speed (anytime you kick-start or bump-start it).
There is a flipside to having a more advanced engine, though. That steep valve angle means that the spark plug is nearly impossible to get to.

The liquid cooling means that the bike could boil over like its big brother, and the automatic compression release means that it isn't manual, and you don't have a choice about when it's on or off. We worried about all these things, but during our test, most of those worries proved unfounded. We never had to change spark plugs and never boiled over. As we mentioned, we did have a hard time starting the bike at times (when hot). It just seems harder to kick than it should be, almost as if that automatic compression release isn't opening enough. If you muster a bunch of leg strength and kick it like it was a 650, then it usually starts. Weird, though, considering that the 650 usually starts even if you limp-leg it. We thought that Kawasaki engineers had figured out how to make four-strokes start when the 650 came out. Maybe they were just lucky.

BUT HOW DOES IT RUN?

Okay, okay, so you have to kick it like you mean it. What happens next? The
KLX has great low-end power. When you first open the throttle, the bilce snaps to attention as well as any bike, any size, two-stroke or four, but .you need to remember that we are talking about a 250 four-stroke here—in general, not a fast breed. No one buys one of these bikes for power. Once you get it into the middle-and high- rev range, the KLX holds true to form. It's no rocket. It is, however, faster than a Honda, provided you remove the tailpipe plug. In stock form, the KLX's muffler is plugged up with a round plate. In the center of that plate, there's a hole about the size of a #2 pencil. How 250cc of exhaust can escape through that opening some 6000 times a minute is beyond us, but the bike does run with it in place. In fact, it runs fairly well. We took it out after our first ride, though, and discovered that, as expected, the bike gains a lot of top-end power at the expense of some noise.

We don't know why Japanese manufacturers aren't more serious about making their bikes quieter. It's obvious that Kawasaki expects every buyer of the KLX to remove that baffle; it even telK you to (for closed-course use, naturally I in the owner's manual. We would almost rather see the bike delivered without the baffle. As it is, the owner becomes the bad guy who modifies the exhaust system—even though Kawasaki secretly expects him to do it. Suzuki and Honda are just  as guilty of the "it's our customers who are evil, not us" syndrome.

Anyway, without the baffle, the bike is pretty strong compared to the Honda XR and the street-legal Suzuki 250. This bike does have a more extensive exhaust system than the Japanese model we tried last spring, and might be a touch slower. However, the KLX is the fastest 250 four-stroke you can buy in this country; does it matter if it's slow compared to any other motorcycle made?

ATTACK OF THE KILLER GENERATOR

Does having ho-hum power make the bike any less fun? Absolutely not! The KLX is a gas because its chassis basically over-handles. The bike handles well enough to win supercrosses; all that's missing is about 20 more horsepower. Well, it would need stiffer suspension, too, but that would be easy. The KLX is fun because you can use it up. You can hold the bike wide open, and want more. The KLX makes heroes of normal riders.

This isn't just illusion, either. In most situations^you are going fast on the KLX. It turns well, it's stable and it never headshakes. It's even fairly light, weighing less than any other four-stroke enduro bike we can think of (aside from a Husa-berg). We set up several play MX tracks and rode the KLX back to back with a modified RM250. On the tracks that were smooth and free of steep hills, the KLX could go just as fast as the RM. It sounded like a generator with a broken governor, but it would match the MX bike through the turns and gullies with ease, and the KLX rider was always looking for more, feeling like he was able to go faster. Even in the straights, the KLX could keep up because it didn't make enough horsepower to spin the tire. On the tracks with big hills, though, the RM would leave the KLX miles behind. Same story when there were really big jumps or G-outs. The KLX suspension isn't set up for that kind of riding.

SPRINGS, GIVE US SPRINGS

What kind of riding is the KLX set up for? It seems the slower you go, the better it is. If you are in the bottom of a canyon that's filled with rocks, sand, roots and ugly stuff like that, the KLX soaks it all up and never deflects off course. If you are in third gear or higher, though, watch out. Any bump that you hit at speed is going tfo hurt. The bike bottoms easily at both ends and feels underdamped, even on the stiffest settings.

Frankly, if the bike didn't feel that way we would complain even louder. This is about as close to an entry-level enduro bike as you will find. If it were sprung for fast riding, it wouldn't work as well in the slow stuff, and we have a feeling that most KLX buyers will want to ride it in the slower stuff first. Later, they can upgrade the suspension with sonje stiffer springs.

That's one thing that should be easy. The Kawasaki fork and shock appear to have a lot of room for improvement. Many four-strokes have cheap steel-bodied shocks (like the KLX650C) or non-cartridge right-side-up forks (like the whole Suzuki DR line). It's tough to make that stuff better. That shouldn't be the case with the KLX, but we don't know yet. We will let you know as we find out more.

DETAIL, FORWARD

Almost all of the small details are good on the KLX. The seat is about the right stiffness, and the brakes are pretty good (we did overheat the rear once, but we were trying to). The clutch pull is light, the bike is super-slim, and, of all things, it looks good.
Like the 650, though, the KLX comes with a non-O-ring chain. That really stinks on a bike this expensive. Vic Krause couldn't wait to send us one of his O-ring chains—the KLX line is like a marketing smorgasbord to him. We put on the Enduromax chain and never worried again; we just pretended like the bike cost that much more in the first place.

That brings us back to where we started—the price. Of the bike's two flaws, the hard starting is the one that we could learn to live with—but will anyone pay this much for a 250cc Japanese four-stroke? People have been known to pay a lot more for European thumpers, but sometimes they will pay a premium just to have a fairly unusual bike. Kawasaki wouldn't be happy with Husaberg-level sales volume. Frankly, we don't know how much money you make—to some people, $4700 is a lot more money than it is to others—but we do know that this is the best 250 four-stroke that has ever been out there, and if that's what you want, you will have to pay for it. The frustrating part is that it were only lOOcc larger, then it would be the best 350 out there, and that would really be something. □

Source DIRTBIKE 1994