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►There are two sweeping
generalities one likely to hear during a discussion of West Coast lifestyles:
(1) It never rains in California, and (2) Southern California dirt riders don't
know how to ride in the mud.
Now for our reply:
Bull.
A quick
review of the weather that drenched California early this year disproves the
first statement, since it rained so hard and for so long that some people were
hard-pressed to tell where the Pacific Ocean left off and Los Angeles began. And
whether or not the second claim is true is pure conjecture, for there really is
enough annual rain on the West Coast to give California dirt riders a little
practice at mud-slinging. The average Eastern rider obviously is only going to
be better in the goo just because he rides in it more often.
In any
case, we know of about 30 riders most of whom were West Coasted—who recently
earned their Masters Degree in Moto-miring at Indian Dunes Raceway when U.S.
Suzuki Motor Company held its Fourth Annual Editors MiniMotocross. The purpose
of this yearly debacle is to introduce the newest Suzuki RM 125 model to the
press. But instead of turning the get-together into a stuffy coat-and-tie bore,
Suzuki keeps the whole affair in its proper perspective by holding a day's worth
of short motos on RM 125s, pitting motorcycle magazine staffers and their test
riders against one another. This year, the Mini-MX was held during one of
several January/February monsoons that turned the racing surface to a sea of
knee-deep quagmire. And even though most of the racing clubs in the area had
been canceling their motocrosses during the downpours, Suzuki took a
show-must-go-on stance and held the event anyway.
Everyone
had fun sloshing around in the muck, even though the lap times were generally
slow enough to require clocking with a calendar. And the bikes often got so
coated with mud that it was hard to tell one 'rider from another. But in the
end, everyone who rode said they wouldn't have missed it for the world.
Unfortunately though, we can't report much about how the new RM 125Cperforms in
relation to its peers. None of us has ever ridden any of the latest 125 berm-burnishers
in a superabundance of slime, so it's hard to say anything real intelligent
about the bike's abilities, except that it seems to work very nicely, indeed.
We can
tell you that just judging by its new features, the RM 125C should be an
improvement over the RM 125B—which was perhaps the fastest of the one-two-fives
when it could get hooked up to the terrain. And it is in that area—
tractability— where the engineers focused much of their attention while
developing the C model. The engine is almost the same as last year's but the
suspension has undergone some notable changes, such as the incorporation of a
two-position rebound damping adjustment on the rear shocks, new shock and fork
spring rates and an aluminum box-section swingarm. The wheel travel is the same
as on the 125B, but there's slightly less front-.wheel trail for quicker
turning. A full-floating rear brake has been added for quicker stopping. There
are also some obvious styling changes, including a new large-filler plastic gas
tank and new plastic fenders.
The rains
finally went away a couple of weeks after the Mini-MX, and hopefully, they'll
stay away for a while. If so, we'll have a complete test on the RM 125C in two
months. If not, we may be busy building an ark.■ |
Bike Tests 
