Gettin' Busy With The Hottest Chick in Class: 2010 YZ450F

By now I’m sure you’ve had an “All new YZ450F!” overload. I mean, the media has been all over this thing since day one, and rightfully so. It’s so hot that you just can’t help but want a piece of her. The YZ450F is the new girl in class, with everyone sniffing around trying to get a ride. Some of the other magazines have ridden her, but only quick and dirty in one location before she went home. Anyway, if you want the techno stuff you can read it on any bathroom wall in town. We at DMX are classier than that. We wined and dined our hot date all over the place, getting busy at the track, in the woods and even wide open on a quarter-mile dirt track…and the more we rode her the more she liked it!

Backwards or not, the new 450 hauls.

First Base: Our test YZ450F had been ridden about 10 hours when I picked her up. She was dressed in virginal white but she wasn’t fooling anyone. Her pimps at Yamaha Canada had cleaned her up, checked her over and decked her out with a fancy new chain and tires. They sat me down and told me and told me how to get her going, keep her going and adjust the way she ran with their magic ‘YZ Power-Tuner’ controller.

The midsection of the YZF is wide open, making it very easy to access the shock.

The first thing I did when I got home was to get her undressed. Not only to check for cooties but also to fiddle around a bit and see just what went where. Coolest things? The airbox, like a Husaberg, is up front. A hinged fuel tank opens to reveal a very easy to access filter with air inlets facing forward. That’s a great place to keep from sucking dirt or water and makes the cave-like airbox on a CRF look like it was designed by a spelunker. Just below the airbox the new twin-spar frame makes top end service, like valve clearance checks, a snap. Behind the left radiator shroud is an idle speed adjuster and a port to link to the YZ power-controller thingamajig. The shock reservoir is horizontal, and the shock itself is incredibly easy to adjust. Just below the shock reservoir is the intestine-like exhaust system, complete with a cancerous-looking lump, that twists and winds all over the place before farting discretely out a new muffler. What we have is an interesting bike that should be fairly easy to live with.

The fuel tank tilts to allow access to the airbox and cylinder head. 

Second Base: We’d recently broken up with a smoking-hot Austrian beauty that left us feeling depressed and lost. Before her we’d been dating a red-faced bitch of a bike that we really didn’t miss at all. So we figured we had a 50/50 shot at finding happiness with the YZF, as long as we could get over our love affair with the 300 KTM and our blasé feelings for the CRF450R. The YZF proved to be somewhere in between those two extremes when we took it to the track. Before I talk about anything else here, I need to talk about the main thing that really started our love affair. She moans…oh man does she moan when you get on it! The intake moan from the front mounted airbox is loud and very seductive. Remember as a kid when you’d flip over the air cleaner lid on your mom’s old Chevy so you could hear that big four-barrel carburetor sucking in the night air? If you don’t, then you’re either a too young or a complete knob. Anyway, some magazine testers have complained about that sexy moan. Those guys fit into the ‘knob’ category.

A new engine and new frame make the new bike a swingin' dance partner.

Let’s get to the big stuff now that we’ve got her moaning. For someone dressed in white this girl sure knows how to move. The YZF doesn’t feel particularly light to wrestle with, but it feels light when you are aboard. Everything is in the right place and steering precision is awesome. Considering this is a 450 the handling is…dare I say it, almost 125-like. She’s got legs too. On a groomed man-made track our expert-level tester notes state , “The suspension is the best I’ve ever ridden.” That may be a bit of a stretch, but the suspension was better at both ends, for more riders, than any bike we’ve tested this year. It required minimal adjustments; the bike was stable, turned great and no tester from weenie to Pro rated either end below eight out of ten.

On the track the YZ450F feels much lighter than it actually is.

When we took our date to the woods she proved to be happy to work her legs there as well. Setting fork compression at #19 and the shock compression at #20 got her comfortable being ridden aggressively between the trees at speed. Maybe not perfect for singletrack, but it’s not bad and on faster trails it’s very good. If you want a squishy trail bike to spode-around on the YZF ain’t it. If you’re a woods-racer however, think twice before handing over the money for a suspension re-valve because you probably don’t need to. The light steering worked well in the woods too, though the weight is more noticeable there than it is on the motocross track. A 450, even a light steering one, is still a big bike for singletrack no matter what. Oh, I should also mention the brakes are awesome everywhere but the clutch pull is too heavy, especially in the woods.

Third Base: She’s got looks and legs, but what about lungs? On the motocross track the backwards cylinder engine’s powerband was not overly aggressive, similar to a CRF but perhaps a tad smoother. This is with stock EFI settings, mind you. More on that in a second. Total power? We took our date to the ultimate horsepower proving ground, the bullring of dirt bike racing. Yup, flat track. Where else can you hold a 450F wide open under a load for lap after lap? With Expert dirt track racer Ryan Rainville aboard, who personally races a 2008 YZ450F, our lady in white hammered around the dirt oval. Coolest thing? By fiddling with fuel and ignition curves you can easily make the YZF run even stronger. After a bit of fiddling we had our girl moaning her guts out. A sweaty, exhausted Ryan Rainville rated raw power at 9+ in our test sheets, with a side note saying, “Raw power excellent-proved it on the flat track!”

The YZFchassis works well in the woods, but with stock EFI settings the engine does not.

In the woods it was a different story. With stock EFI settings she was having coughing and gagging fits on the trail, protesting low-rpm situations by flaming-out at the most inappropriate times. Those ‘cough and dies’ were usually followed by desperate attempts at begging, tickling and fondling to get her running again. That sucked, because as we mentioned the handling and suspension craved a race pace through the woods. Our Pro tester rated the powerband in the woods, with the stock EFI settings, at a mere three. We called Yamaha, who sent over some off-road EFI settings, but that didn’t help much either. We were bummed. We were convinced we’d have to resort to flywheel weights and lower final-drive gearing to make her work off-road. We were frustrated and dragged her home.

Plug and play. The YZF can be made to run however you want with the YZ Power Tuner. 

Relationships always seem better in the morning, so the following day we returned to the woods vowing to get over our lovers spat. We rode lap after lap around the super-secret DMX off-road course, constantly making minor adjustments to the fuel and ignition settings with the YZ Power Tuner. And it was working. We were making slow but real progress and eventually agreed on the following settings for tight forest singletrack racing. Set up like this she was still no fluffy trail bike but she didn’t stall, started first kick and had a very effective woods racing powerband. Low-end power had less hit, mid range transition was smoother and top end just a tad weaker than stock. No longer did the flywheel feel too light or the gearing seem too tall for aggressive woods racing. If you have a YZF and want to race off-road, or even on a slippery or really gnarly motocross track, these settings will help a whole bunch.

EFI:

FUEL            4000RPM            6500RPM            9000RPM

1/8                    +4                            +4                           -3                          

3/8                    +4                            +4                           -4

6/8                     -3                             -4                           -4

IGN                4000RPM            6500RPM            9000RPM

1/8                      -3                           -3                           -3

3/8                      -3                           -3                            0

6/8                      -3                           -3                           -3

Success, through the magic of electronics! Re-tuned, the YZF became an effective woods racer.

Home Run? Our love affair with the YZ450F was rekindled after that tuning session. I mean, who wants a date that will only put out under certain conditions? She has awesome suspension and handling and is easy to work on. The best part? That YZ Power Tuner makes it possible to turn her into anything you want, from screamer to pussycat. Like any hot chick, she could be annoying. The radiators, bigger and stronger than years past, still need guards in the worst way. We squashed the right radiator on our test bike in a minor fall. By some miracle it didn’t leak and we twisted it back into shape with very little effort. While you’re beefing up the radiators, invest in some additional armour for the front of the engine; we were constantly pulling rocks, sticks, and huge blobs of mud out of the area between the cylinder and the front down tubes. This is a really vulnerable area and it’d be easy to imagine a rock blasting a hole through the engine cases. The plastic quality looks and feels cobby, and like any woman in white gets tired-looking fast. Go for the blue version, which like a French chick retains its looks as it ages. The clutch pull was too heavy for our weak-fingered testers, and it’s next to impossible to see the gas level in the grey fuel tank. But that stuff is minor. Our honeymoon love affair with the YZ450F is still going strong, besides, when you’re going out with the hottest chick in the class you have to expect to deal with a few little headaches…