Honda dealers and riders have been screaming for a lightweight road legal enduro bike for years, and with the arrival of the CRF250X their prayers have been answered.

Yamaha have been able to challenge Honda for the #1 sales spot in Australia in recent years directly off the back of their WR250F and WR450F road legal enduro bikes. At one point the tuning fork brand claimed to have taken Honda’s almost customary #1 spot, but ‘Big Red’ is back to try and ensure that never happens again with the arrival of the CRF250X. This important new model will then be followed by the CRF450X early next year, this will then give Honda a full armoury of road legal enduro weapons in what they hope will be a profitable move to extend their position at the top of the charts.

Australia is the only country in the world where Yamaha’s WR is road legal, and is also now the only place where the CRF250X can be legally ridden on the road. This is not because we are treated as a special case by Japan. It is because the Australian Yamaha and Honda arms have gone to great lengths to locally modify the base machines for ADR compliance.

We are very lucky indeed that they have gone to this trouble. It opens whole new areas for exploring as registered machines are granted access to the same areas where licensed four wheel drive vehicles are legal to venture. While it is easy for legislators to enact laws which ban unlicensed vehicles from areas, they are presented with many more problems when it comes to preventing legally registered vehicles from gaining access. This works in our favour, it would be a brave government that decided to allow only four wheeled registered vehicles in certain areas but to ban similarly registered motorcycles. That would be grounds for a full scale revolt against the government in question I would reckon!

Anyway, I digress, back to the bike…