Classic Bike Guide - Real rides, real riders

Honda XL250

­As we have already seen previously in CBG, Yamaha was the first to truly globally commercialise the concept of a purpose built, series production, trail bike, with its DT1 250. Kawasaki had, latterly, dropped a languid hand in the pool and had a brief dalliance with the concept via the F4 Sidewinder, followed by the slightly more refined F8 Bison and finally got pretty much on the money with the F11s. Suzuki was actually pretty quick in bringing out a competitor in the form of the 1969 TS250 Savage (or confusingly named Hustler in Japan). The Honda Motor Corporation chose what in response to this surge exactly? The sanguine answer was precisely nothing, at least as far as the public was concerned.

In reality the arrival of Yamaha’s mould breaking DT1 couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Big Aitch. Flushed with success from the revolutionary earlier 1960s models and buoyed up by countless two-wheeled victories on the race tracks the company had a long term game plan that was heavily dependent upon four wheels.

Honda knew that to expand it had to diversify and this meant earning hard currency in huge volume; the only way to achieve this was going to be via automobiles.

As if to underline its own self belief that it had reached an almost insurmountable pinnacle, Honda gifted the world the seminal CB750/4 as if to say, ’This is what Honda can do, better it if you can!’ Although hugely successful Honda wasn’t perfect and when someone comes up with a revenue generator as good as Yamaha’s DT1 it’d be a fool who declined the challenge. Set against this background the R&D boys were tasked with producing Honda’s take on the 250cc dirt bike.

While the boffins were beavering away at their drawing boards Honda continued to sell machines such as the CL350 twin; a mildly, off-road converted, analogue of the street CB350. In fact Honda had been quite successfully converting a number of machines to pseudo or partial off-road capability for a number of years and making good money at it. High piped versions of CB72/77 had been sold as CL72s or 77s for several years and these machines were probably some of the first real street scramblers.

The key to their success was the fact that they were four-strokes. Honda was very well aware that there was a huge segment of the bike buying public that didn’t want a two-stroke and equally still didn’t trust what until recently had been an oily, unreliable and pedestrian power unit. Given Soichiro’s aversion to all things two-stroke, Honda’s reply to the DT1 was always going to be based around the poppet valve and overhead cam.

The machine that Honda chose to launch in 1972 may have been a long time in coming, four years is a pretty long gestation time for any machine, but when it arrived it did so in style. April of that year saw a four-stroke single with a four valve head, high level exhaust and real off-road capability. In the off-road and enduro racing world where two-stroke trail bike crackle was the norm, Honda’s lone four-stroke bark made certain folk sit up and listen but many refused to believe that the bike could be a serious threat to the establishment; after all the Japanese might be good but they had little or no real background in four-stroke singles.

In October 1972 Cycle magazine reported how Ron Jones was riding one of the new four-valve Hondas, the machine all of the expert magazine road-testers said would never be a threat in major competition. At the Virginia City Grand Prix, in a field of strong riders on 400 AJS, Husqvarna, Maico, 360 CZ and BSA plus big Triumphs, Jones beat everyone on his 250 Honda. 160 miles of tough off-road racing with a 60% machine failure rate said a lot about an apparently inconsequential rice burner. Factor in that the bike had only 25 miles on the clock and minimal preparation and it gives a very good idea as to how good the basic XL250 was.

Race preparation was basic to say the least; a set of competition knobblies and chunky bash plate were about it. In typical Honda thoroughness the engine had been both expertly designed and exquisitely manufactured. The bike was built with competition in mind and as such unnecessary items could be easily removed so weight could be reduced when the conditions demanded it, the bike even featured magnesium engine side cases to keep the mass down. More importantly the engine had been both designed and developed to give a strong and predictably linear torque curve that made the bike oh so sweet to ride.

Honda may have been a little tardy in coming to the world of purpose built trail bikes but hit the nail squarely on the head with the XL250; this really was (and remains) Honda at its very best. The key to it all was a motor that demonstrated a level of technical sophistication rarely seen before in a quarter-litre, series production machine and even today it remains a design lesson in air-cooled four-stroke singles.

Someone at Honda Central burnt a lot of midnight oil getting the motor and especially that four valve head correct and the hard work paid off; the pull and drive from the engine is legendary. Add in Honda build quality, an exhaust system well out of harm’s way, the subtle, understated classic lines plus good ergonomics and it’s hard to see how the original bike could have bombed. All of this is obviously within the contexts and restraints of the early 1970s. Four decades on and enduros have a totally different raison d’être but to compare the XL250 with a modern machine would be simply wrong headed.

If Honda erred on the side of caution by not liberating too many ponies with the original bike then it actually played a blinder; the XL250 was to carry on in one guise or another until 1987 which is no mean achievement in Japanese manufacturing terms. Honda went on to upgrade the original 250 to a 350 and American tuning firms swiftly produced performance kits that took the motor out to 450cc. Rather than being a lone voice in the wilderness, Honda’s XL250 was to show the way forward with trail bikes. Yamaha’s XT500, Suzuki’s DR 250/350/400 and whole range of similar machinery owe a huge debt of gratitude to a seminal mould breaker.

Words by Steve Cooper Photographs from Mortons Archive