The following Article appeared in the September issue of DirtRider DownUnder magazine as a guest column. Written by Terry Baisley the Vice President Of Sales for Fly Racing. Enjoy!
I long for the days of the good old two-stroke motorcycle. When you could rebuild a top-end by yourself without having to have the knowledge of an engineer to figure out where all the pieces went and how they fit back together. When the biggest challenge was to remember to put a rag over the crankcase so you didn’t drop a circle-clip ‘downstairs’.
The sound of a good two-stroke motorcycle… there’s nothing like it in the entire world. You can usually spot people that have been around two-stroke motorcycles in a crowd. We are the people that don’t hear too well. Earplugs were for people that ‘didn’t get it’. They were usually the people that always had their fingers in their ears at the start of a moto. They deprived themselves of the earsplitting pleasure that others enjoyed.
Most of all, I really miss the smell of a two-stroke motorcycle. The sweet smell of two-stroke exhaust polluting the air, there is nothing like it! I remember being freshly married to my wonderful wife, I crashed at this local race and broke my leg. I was stuck on the couch, listening to the radio, watching TV and benchracing with my friends. It was killing me to be stuck and even more, it was killing me not to be able to ride.
One Saturday afternoon, we were al sitting there, leg in the air and all my friends talking about going riding that afternoon. I came up with a ‘brain storm’. I asked my friend to go get me some Blendzall Gold (two-stroke oil) from the garage-you know, the good stuff-the stuff made
Don’t try this at home!!
from bean oil that smells sooo good! He brought it into the house and I proceeded to put it in a frying pan. Presto a ‘Two-Stroke Air Freshener’. We turned the heat way up high as quick as we could to get it ‘smelling right’. After some fine-tuning mostly taking some oil out of the pan to lean up the mixture, it started to make smoke.
This was awesome… it smelt great and now the house was smelling much more like a racetrack. I felt better, the pain in my leg subsided and my general attitude improved greatly… hahaha.
Four-strokes are great motorcycles and seem to be the way of the future, but it’s still god to see that some manufacturers are still offering two-strokes for 2011. With a new technology, there is also talk of a low-pollution two-stroke design that may make it’s way into production in the coming years.
The cost of racing a two-stroke 250cc is much less than a four-stroke 250cc. It’s good to see when 250 two-stroke bikes are allowed to race with 250cc four-stroke bikes. This makes for more cost effective racing and allows people more of their budget to race different tracks and different series, instead of spending it all on keeping a 250cc four-stroke fresh.
At the end of the day, riding is riding and there is nothing that replaces the feel it gives all of us. But, my heart still longs for the sound and smell of a good two-stroke motorcycle.
