Most ATVs make some pretense of usefulness. Sure, you’re going to use them to screw around in the woods, wallowing in mud holes and pulling wheelies on the straights—but they could do work around the farm. When an ATV has cargo racks or four-wheel-drive or a hitch, you can envision slinging a load of just about anything back there.
That’s not the case with the Yamaha YFZ 450R SE. It doesn’t have racks, or four-wheel-drive, or even reverse. It’s built to lap motocross tracks at utmost speed. This machine is about pure, silly fun.
The 450R is a throwback. As a pure sport quad, it's a spiritual descendant of the legendary Yamaha Banshee. The Banshee was a twin-cylinder two-stroke, and an old one would probably pull the 450R in a straight drag race. So would the 450R’s big-bore sibling, the Raptor 700R.
But on rugged terrain, the 450R would leave them both in its dusty wake. The ATV weighs only 405 pounds (wet) and has 9.8 inches of suspension travel up front, 11 in the back. It absolutely devours bumps. While the Yamaha breezes over the undulating terrain, you find yourself shifting into higher gears and reaching higher speeds just to find out when the ride starts to get sloppy. The answer was usually, “faster than I dare to go.” According to my GPS, the 450R topped out at more than 60 mph on soft grass. So it probably goes a little bit faster than that on packed dirt.
The liquid-cooled single-cylinder—five-valve head, titanium valves—has so much screaming top end that at first, I kept trying to upshift the five-speed manual transmission to a nonexistent sixth gear on those long straights. Through the corners and bumps it feels ludicrously stable—low and wide, so when you pitch it sideways you don’t feel like you’re an America’s Cup sailor hanging off the high side a heeling catamaran. And with the manual five-speed, you have a degree of control that’s just never there with a CVT. If you need to bring the rear end around, you can even slip the clutch and then drop it to give the rear end a quick hit of power, like drift drivers do. This thing can roost.
And when you do go airborne, it’s easy. I’m not big on flying ATVs, but the 450R is as good a partner as you could want. It’s balanced and responsive, so that when you leave the ground you can adjust your midair attitude with the throttle. Back off and the nose goes down. Blip the throttle and you can level it out, land flat and keep riding as if you never left the ground in the first place. All that suspension travel helps cover for your mistakes even when you goof it up.
The 450 R is seriously fun. For $9,809, it should be. Then again, how many other factory race quads are out there? Back in the day, Suzuki and Honda competed with Yamaha for sport-quad supremacy. Now Honda’s biggest sport bike is a 250 and Suzuki doesn’t even make anything like this anymore—everybody’s all-in on 4x4s and racks and pretenses of farm-life utility.
At least Yamaha is keeping the candle lit for ATVs that don’t aspire to anything more than joy.
Ezra Dyer is a Car and Driver senior editor and columnist. He's now based in North Carolina but still remembers how to turn right. He owns a 2009 GEM e4 and once drove 206 mph. Those facts are mutually exclusive.
