ASK THE MXPERTS: THE SAD TALE OF THE 2008 SUZUKI RM-Z450

This crack spelled disaster for the 2008 Suzuki RM-Z450.

Dear MXA,
There is a guy in my town who wants to sell his old 2008 Suzuki RM-Z450. It is in pristine condition, and he only wants $2000 for it. I was gonna jump on it, but wasn’t there an RM-Z450 that broke almost instantly—and didn’t Suzuki stop selling it while they came up with a fix? Was that 2007, 2008 or 2009?

Back in 2008, Suzuki gambled on offering the first mass-production fuel-injected 450 motocross bike. Suzuki hoped that coming out with the first bike with EFI would result in a massive increase in bike sales. It was an aggressive marketing ploy, and Suzuki hoped that beating Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki and KTM to fuel injection would leapfrog them to the front of the pack. But, during prototype testing, they had a series of mechanical woes that delayed production, not the least of which was serious whine coming from somewhere deep in the engine’s internals. By the time they fixed that problem, they had lost the first four months of the selling season. Then, to make matters worse, in the first week that the 2008 RM-Z450 was out, MXA blew the engine cases apart. The kickstart idler gear bound up in the cases, cocked sideways and cracked the center cases horizontally. It was not good, not pretty and not something that we ever expected to happen. Ours wasn’t the only case to crack, just the first one.

Suzuki didn’t have a fix. It’s not like they had either the spare cases or the manpower to change every set of cases on the showroom floors. And if they had, it would have been with the same cases that were breaking. Suzuki’s engineers decided that they could alleviate the problem by retarding the ignition and warning riders about allowing the kickstarter to kick back. Nothing worked. In the end, the 2008 Suzuki RM-Z450 was subject to a recall, and the number of units that actually got out to the public was minuscule.

When the 2009 Suzuki RM-Z450 model came out, Suzuki had reinforced the right-side engine case with additional ribs and thicker wall diameters. There were no other changes between the 2008 and 2009 RM-Z450s. We would be leery of buying any 2008 Suzuki RM-Z450 unless the seller can confirm that he had the right-side engine cases changed.