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What if you could take a track day experience — the motorcycle, the circuit, the speeds, and the expense — and shrink everything down except for the fun factor and skill development?
That’s exactly what mini moto does. We’re talking about small, typically sub-250 cc motorcycles being ridden at go-kart tracks or less commonly parking-lot cone courses. It may sound (and often looks) puerile, but mini moto is one of Zack’s and my favorite forms of motorcycling.
We love it because it’s absurdly amusing, affordable, and at least here in SoCal, very accessible. It concentrates all the best parts of a regular track day on a full-size sport bike, but avoids the expensive entry fee, pricey tires that get worn out in a day, and the kinetic energy of triple-digit speeds.
There are bigger-picture benefits, too. Since the bikes, velocities, and community are less intimidating, mini moto is an attractive gateway for new riders (I've lent my Honda CRF50 mini to newbs many times). At the same time, the dynamics of piloting a motorcycle at speed are the same as on a big bike at a big track, so mini riding is valuable training, even for accomplished racers. In fact, it's not uncommon to see national- and occasionally world-level pros at our local 0.9-mile circuit. It really is a sweet spot in motorcycling, and we want more people to get into it.
To that end, we created a video addressing one of the biggest questions we get about mini moto: Which bike should you ride? There are loads of disparate candidates so it’s a complicated question, but we boiled it down to four key categories in the video below.
The next big hurdle is finding a place to ride. This national kart track directory compiled by the folks at RaceVision.io is a great place to start, but not all tracks welcome bikes. (Get enough riders together that are willing to pay an entry fee, and that could change.) A parking lot and a stack of cones can serve the same purpose, as long as you take adequate precautions and get the property owner’s approval.
One of my favorite mini-moto experiences was ripping around the Motorcyclist magazine office park after hours on Honda CRF50s. Zack, Spenser, and I concocted a pretty dynamic track, and the slurry-sealed surface was slick enough to cause our $53 Bridgestones to slide. Below is a glimpse of the action, which would go on for hours with only a few cups of gasoline consumed.
Reminiscing about CRF50 shenanigans reminds me of a fairly important point that we left out of the video, and that’s to consider the bikes you’ll likely be riding with. A 3.5-horsepower CRF50 may be cheap to buy and modify, but it’s dog slow, so best enjoyed with others on similarly feeble machines. Same goes for mixing like bikes such as Honda Groms and Kawasaki Z125s, Honda CRF150Rs and Suzuki RM85s, and Ohvales. See what's popular at your local track or venue and aim to ride something within the same performance bracket for maximum compatibility and fun.
It’s widely understood that children and young animals play because it helps develop their brains and bodies. Play is nature’s training ground. The same can be said for mini moto. It’s pretty goofy, but it does more than exercise the muscles that make you smile.
We hope you’ll try it.
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