It's easy to tell when a market segment is about to burst—manufacturer's start either A) slapping together models with parts-bin engineering to fill the gap or B) get awesome new products on the drawing board, and then tease and tease when the real production model will come out. Sometimes the tease goes on for two or three years, which can seem like an enormous wait, but that's actually fairly quick for bike development. But when a segment is blowing up, you've got to let the world know you're gonna get your hat in that ring. So this is how we know the mid-sized Adventure market is about to burst. Yamaha is teasing a 2020 model for the U.S. right now. Today's Yamaha PR says the "Ténéré 700 is scheduled to arrive at U.S. dealerships in the second half of 2020." So that's like two years away. Oh, they're not alone with this upcoming delay. KTM already has a strong adventure line but the mid-sized market is a must-do, so they've been teasing a 790 model for awhile now, but it's still not out. 

Is this Steve Matthes' dream machine? We know side-by-side vehicles keep getting larger and more powerful, but no one was expecting a concept vehicle based on an actual street-legal pickup truck. But Honda unveiled such a machine at the SEMA show today. Dubbed the Honda Rugged Open Air Vehicle, this is a Ridgeline pickup... deep down inside, but the body has been stripped and replaced with panels and a roll cage to mimick the look of the Pioneer 1000 side-by-side off-road machine.

Then we turned off onto a fire road with packed dirt over which was slathered a layer of gravel about the size of walnuts. With every twist of the throttle on this salad of slip the rear tire lurched out sideways alarmingly. The moto men all thought this was another blast, and they ripped through it all with glee. It took me a while to realize that you use the sliding back tire to aim the less-sliding front, that the rocks machine-gunning from the back tire acted like retro rockets pointing the nose around the corners. It was terrifying, yes, but fun-terrifying. I kept up. Then we turned off onto a fire road with packed dirt over which was slathered a layer of gravel about the size of walnuts. With every twist of the throttle on this salad of slip the rear tire lurched out sideways alarmingly. The moto men all thought this was another blast, and they ripped through it all with glee. It took me a while to realize that you use the sliding back tire to aim the less-sliding front, that the rocks machine-gunning from the back tire acted like retro rockets pointing the nose around the corners. It was terrifying, yes, but fun-terrifying. I kept up.

A few weeks ago we heard rumors that Yamaha was about to relocate major parts of its motorsports business from its California offices to Georgia, and yesterday the news was confirmed via a Yamaha press release. A brand new Yamaha Motor Corporation U.S.A. corporate office opened on Monday, October 1 in Marietta, Georgia. However, the race team is staying out west.

With all of the hubbub surrounding Team Puerto Rico for this year’s Motocross of Nations, we decided to do some research to see just how many territories the good ole U S of A actually owns, and then—because it was amusing to us—conducted a fantasy draft of riders and placed them on teams to represent each territory.

Old-school NASCAR fans love to tell you that their sport lost its way. They like to complain about gimmick stuff like the Playoff format and Stage Racing, but the primary complaint all around, and the one most often used to and explain the trail off from the super peak of the mid-2000s. Of course, simply “not enough good racing” is an over simplification, the sport faces a lot of head winds, and some are those shared by every other event trying to get people to put butts in seats and click on the TV remote while battling YouTube and social media content for attention. And, further, not every old-school NASCAR race really featured a door-to-door bash fest until the finish. That’s just nostalgia saying that, the same way our fans remember every supercross main event on a two-stroke being a barn burner. The biggest problem? The worst racing happens on the 1.5 mile tracks, referred to as Intermediates. But those are the most common tracks in NASCAR! The short tracks still produce some beatin’ and bangin’, and the huge Superspeedway tracks are Daytona and Talledega create giant pack races. Medium sized tracks don’t. Here’s how far things have flipped: NASCAR always throws a few road course races on the schedule (left and right turns) but those used to look like a square peg and a round hole for stock cars. Somewhere along the way, though, the road courses became the antithesis of the high-speed but no passing Intermediates. Intermediates lacked for passing, but the road courses just gained more bumping and bashing, and the fans started loving it. The common request? More road coarses and short tracks, fewer intermediates. Especially in the NASCAR Playoffs, which are predominantly made of Intermediate-length tracks. But, contracts are locked in. Tracks have made huge investments and they’re not going away.

I can now, for the first time, come up with legitimate economic reasoning for riding a dirt bike. I finally got to attend a new bike media intro, and man, now I know the other side lives very well. These media test guys, they get the treatment!

My story is not a tragic one, and I need to make this clear: Virtually any story you hear about this day is more serious than the story I’m about to tell. For all of the lives lost in this senseless tragedy, for all the families really affected, my heart bleeds for you. My tale is comparatively lame, but we all have September 11 stories. This is mine.

You know how, before the last race of the season, everyone makes up crazy scenarios on how the would-be champion actually would not win the title? You've seen them. What if it rains? What if the dude gets taken out? What if his bike breaks? Well, it actually happened to Joel Hetrick in the ATV Motocross season finale over the weekend at Loretta Lynn's.

Somehow, some way, Dylan Ferrandis finished the first Unadilla moto with clean goggles. All day, riders were stopping in the pits for goggles. How the heck did he do it? 

The absolute best part of the nationals? The fans get up close and personal to the action—probably more so than any other motorsport. Heck, at Unadilla, they even helped Dylan Ferrandis win the race. Just check out this clip from our Remastered video by Mason Rader. Aaron Plessinger hooks up this fan with his goggles near the Unadilla podium, and the dude is super, super beyond stoked! Check it out.

Trades shouldn't be possible in a race where teams are based on nationality, but while the world was talking USA vs. France in a team battle and Herlings vs. Tomac for individual honors, a controversy led the Dutch team to add some serious talent. Can South Africa's Calvin Vlaanderen push the Dutch to the top spot for the first time? Sounds strange, but it's very real.