It’s the great question of the internal combustion motorcycle era: What happened to two-stroke motorcycles? In the video below (put together by Red Bull to promote its Straight Rhythm event), we get an answer… or do we?

If you watch all those insiders, it’s easy to get the impression that someday, the magical Internal Combustion Fairy came along and told manufacturers to stop making two-strokes, while simultaneously bending the rulebook to favor four-strokes somewhere around the early 2000s. Uh, that’s not really the case.

The reality is, two-strokes had been dying off in western markets for many years, particularly in the US. By the early 2000s, closed-course off-road competition was the only place where you commonly saw two-strokes in action, unless you count scooters… and even the two-smoker step-throughs were on their way out not long after. Even MotoGP, the playground of motorcycles with no relation at all to production bikes, saw two-strokes banned in the 2000s. In the US, two-stroke road rockets like the Suzuki Gamma or Honda NSR250 had disappeared many years earlier, along with two-stroke enduros like the Yamaha DT series. Motocross and enduro were really the last place that two-strokes held on.

Why were two-strokes cut from production? Emissions standards were certainly to blame for some models’ disappearance. Other models just weren’t updated, because it was obvious regulators were encouraging the move to four-strokes, and really, so was much of the market. And some models were never cut, but they also disappeared from top-tier competition. The video is correct in pointing out that racing rulebooks favor four-strokes, and racers who want to win will go that direction.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though; at least two-strokes are alive and well in the trailbike world, and the Japanese do still offer certain bikes in certain markets with two-stroke engines (note that the YZ125 is still going strong in 2023!). And some people, particularly boutique firms, are still working at developing the technology into the 2030s, even as the world shifts away from petrol entirely, towards electric vehicles.

Sourse: Advrider

#Adventure #Moto #Bike #Offroad #Enduro #Dirt #Twostroke