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By: Jason Giacchino
Email: offthepegs @ atvsource.com
February 2009 - Off The Pegs
A Brief Tribute to
the Recent Past
Yamaha YT125 |
I’ll be the first to admit my bias toward the
sport/performance segment of the ATV market. I
came up through the ranks on equipment so basic
it was considered old school even when it was
new. The transition from three to four wheels
was welcomed by me personally as I had just
about had my share of low speed tip-overs and
swims in the farmer’s irrigation ditch on
account of the engineering deficiencies of my
1981 Yamaha YT125 Tri-Moto.
I bring up this ancient history because I’m
continually awed by the recent explosion of
technological progression our sport has
experienced. I suppose like anything else in
life, it takes having experienced the original
to fully appreciate the evolution involved, and
I was really made aware of this reality this
past fall as the 2009 models were trickling from
the factories.
I was fortunate enough to have been able to log
some lap times in on some of the most
anticipated of these 450s and came away
impressed despite going in with extremely high
expectations. Just before winter hit pretty
hard, I was testing some of the new models at an
open motocross practice at a semi-professional
race facility outside Rochester New York when I
made the startling observation that I was
sharing the track with a pack of ATV racers
under the age of sixteen. Mounted on their YFZs
and KFXs, it is quite unlikely that any of them
have even straddled a three-wheeler (or for that
matter seen one), or spent $20,000 in
modifications in an effort to extract every last
ounce of performance from a fifteen year-old
Honda 250R. As good as today’s race equipment
has gotten (and I can attest, it is really
good), is it possible that there are countless
riders who will never be able to fully
appreciate it as they’ve never experienced what
used to pass as cutting edge?
I suppose the same argument can be made for just
about everything; there aren’t too many auto
enthusiasts who can compare the experience of
driving this year’s Corvette with a Model T and
these same kids who never got to dive headlong
into an irrigation ditch while their
three-wheeler tumbled past likely never used a
payphone, remember a time without the Internet,
watched black and white television, or stayed up
all night playing Atari until the joystick
broke, either. Yet I can only assume the joys of
surfing the net, texting their pals with their
own cell phones, watching their favorite shows
on an LCD display, or racing quads on their
Playstation 3s are no less significant.
And while I don’t want to come off as some old
grouch trying to teach the later generation
about yesteryear, I can justify my ranting on
account of the fact that right now, in this very
moment, we all benefit from the manufacturers’
surge in performance interest. The only catch is
that the cycle never really stops and twenty
years from now, when ATVs hover above the
track’s surface on magnetic pads, the kids of
today will wonder how riders of the future can
fully appreciate what they’ve got without
experiencing the rough and tumble
gasoline-burning, ground-shredding machines they
grew up with. You could try to explain it to
them, but somehow it’s just not the same.
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