Dear MXA,
I can remember reading Yamaha reviews in the 1990's and they would win shootouts with the exact same kind of reviews MXA is giving them now! You would use words like "workman-like," while giving them the top step of the shootout. In this past year's 2009 250 Shootout you knock the 2009 YZ250F down because it essentially doesn't to anything "glaringly wrong." How is that?
This is no different than being stranded on an island with four women. All of them are ugly, but one doesn’t have a wart on her face—thus she wins. There are years when the most reliable or least flawed bike wins a shootout because the other bikes have worse flaws. In the case of the 2009 Yamaha YZ250F, it faced terrific competition from the CRF250 and KX250F—and neither of them had warts on their faces. The 2009 YZ250F was an old design and the only place that Yamaha has improved in recent years is in the suspension department. The 2009 Yamaha YZ250F was not a cutting edge design in terms of performance or engineering. A workman-like bike can win when the competition is weak, but not when it is strong.
As we enter into the 2010 Shootout season, the game is wide open.
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