Coming from a background of mostly dirt bike riding, I hadn’ t actually done much time on the road before I hopped on Suzuki’ s V-Strom 250SX. But after clocking just over 1000km in a mix of conditions, covering everything from work commutes and highway missions to Auckland, to backroad gravel and an organised adventure ride, it’ s fair to say this little machine has become something of an unlikely favourite … so I wanted to see how the little Suzuki would fare as a small-bore motocamping machine.
THE PLAN My adventure was to take me to Northland in the middle of August. I left my trusty KLR in the garage and hit the road on the Suzuki V-Strom
250SX for a test ride. I’ m not going to talk about the technical details of the V-Strom 250SX, you can always look up on the Suzuki website what the‘ SEP engine features’ and‘ SOCS’ are- as well as what technologies have trickled down from MotoGP, how much bigger and easier to read the LCD instrument cluster is … and all the rest of that stuff. These things just go over my head anyway. What I wanted to know was if the mini V-Strom could take me on an adventure and do just as well as a bigger machine. Since the weather forecast was less than brilliant for leaving on the Saturday morning, I decided to bring things forward and head off on Friday evening to avoid riding in the next
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