Suzuki DRZ: thoughts on the DR-Z4S's competitors (part 3/3)

Dual motorbikes, or “enduros”, before this definition led to confusion with enduro racing bikes, were born with yet another name, namely “scramblers”. Scrambles were competitions that were all the rage in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s, and were nothing more than motocross races on a natural, non-permanent track, a grassy area with a track outlined by a rope attached to stakes, like the slats of enduro racing, but much wider and more spread out. They were obviously very simple races to organise in a land full of pastures and meadows, and in those years such races were run practically every Sunday and at every level, attracting a public that was sometimes counted in the tens of thousands, just to give you an idea.

The participants were renowned riders, followed and contested by the manufacturers, but also passionate people who for one day raced the same bike they used to go to work with during the week, often not even changing the tyres, at most taking the lights off. The bikes were simple: an engine, a frame, suspension, wheels, tank and seat, not much more. 

BSA was the first to have a great sales success with a scrambler motorbike, even outside the competitive field (there were already versions of the BSA Gold Star or the Matchless G80, to name but two, but they were considered competition bikes), it was the Victor Special, directly derived from the b44 and b50 two-time winners of the 500 class Motocross World Championship with Jeff Smith in 1964 and ’65: Thousands were sold on the thriving US market and the image of Michael Lang, the organiser, riding a BSA Victor Special around the Woodstock festival is famous.

The BSA, however, like practically all British brands, was unable to react to the renewal imposed by the Japanese factories and disappeared from the scene at the end of the 1960s. It was precisely the Japanese manufacturers that filled the market with an endless series of small scramblers with which the very young Americans happily roamed the deserts, prairies, ranches, but also the city. In 1975 Yamaha introduced the XT 500, what is in fact considered (albeit somewhat improperly, as we have seen) the first true road enduro bike. It was a bike that had many merits, which in the end could be summed up in one word: simplicity, great simplicity. Like the English scramblers: engine, frame, suspension, wheels, tank and saddle, nothing else was needed to go a bit everywhere, but without the limitations of racing bikes, which by then had become too extreme to be usable in everyday life.

The XT 500 evolved into the XT 550 and then the XT 600, which were better and better, but still light and usable and capable of everything. Then, in the anxiety of market competition with other manufacturers, electric starters, fairings were added and everything developed to single-cylinder bikes that weighed 200 kg and more. They were fine, no question, but they had completely lost the simplicity, agility and usability of their progenitors. And in fact, as chance would have it, far fewer of them were sold than before.

The problem is that motorbikes were (and often still are) made with criteria that do not take the motorcyclist into account in the slightest, perhaps also because the people who decide on them may have ridden them just to get their picture taken. They lose, or more likely have never even considered, the basic concept that a motorbike must be easy, agile, light and pleasant to ride. Then they fill them with totally useless and in the long run burdensome rubbish, or an infinite number of settings that the user is almost always incapable of using, not to mention the mappings...

Since you will rightly say who am I to talk like this, I will quote a phrase from one who understood motorbikes, Carlo Guzzi: “Everything that is not there does not cost, does not weigh, does not break”.

Of simple, light motorbikes capable of doing everything, but at the same time made with care and scrupulousness, there were fewer and fewer left. In fact, the now 40-year-old motorbikes of the 1980s are still highly sought-after and valuable, and so are the very few motorbikes that followed them, such as the Suzuki DR 350, Kawasaki KLX 300 R, Honda XR 400 or Suzuki DR-Z 400: try to see what the prices are for one of these used, but in excellent condition, if you can find it.

In today's neglected market, often unable to understand the true needs of buyers, Chinese and Indian companies have entered, filling cities with simple, agile and cheap motorbikes, forcing the Japanese giants to chase them with guilty delay.

For dual enduros, until this year there were only two bikes at the two extremes: the very easy, but too poorly equipped, Honda CRF 300 L, and the KTM 690 R (and derivatives in other colours with other brands), excellent, but demanding and far too powerful. There was nothing in between.

A company like Beta, in my opinion, missed a huge opportunity by not creating a simplified and more usable model of its 350 and 390 race enduro bikes.

After barely twenty years of reflection, Suzuki has decided to renew its highly successful DR-Z 400, wisely shifting it even more towards a dual vocation, but at a price that is not modest (albeit partially compensated for by the production quality) and perhaps on the edge of time: just look at the very recent Chinese offerings at EICMA in Milan.