1981 ATC250R

Performance First. These two words say all one ever needs to know about Honda’s relentless quest to produce the industry’s finest motorsports machinery. Perhaps less apparent, though, at least to the casual enthusiast, is how aptly this, their official powersports mantra, defines what’s arguably Honda’s greatest and most enduring role: that of market revolutionary.

For decades, Honda has been the bellwether of innovation, introducing products across all motorsports segments that forever changed the way we look at performance.

The ATC250R, introduced in 1981, was one such machine. It marked the debut of the world’s first true high-performance ATC, signaling not only that Honda was as serious about winning on three wheels as it was on two, but also paving the way for the modern ATVs of today, the Baja 1000-winning Honda FourTrax Rincon being the most recent example.

Before 1981, odds were that the only way you could get your hands on a high-performance three-wheeler was to build it yourself, usually in the form of boring and stroking an engine to the absolute limits of its original design. All that changed for good when the ATC250R took its bow, starting with a completely new frame boasting a swingarm, adjustable Showa forks and rear shock, and front disc brake (all ATC firsts).The engine, too, was something never seen before in an ATC: a slightly detuned, liquid-cooled, 248cc two-stroke single straight out of Honda’s CR250R motocrosser, refined even further with a vibration-reducing counterbalancer. Mated to a close-ratio, race-spec, five-speed manual transmission, the ATC250R was as much at home slicing nimbly through the woods as it was railing across the desert.

None other than racing legend Mickey Thompson witnessed this performance firsthand at the 1980 Baja 1000. As the story goes, a group of Honda associates, running unofficially on preproduction ATC250Rs, surprised Thompson when they caught and passed him prerunning for the race. (Honda’s first official ATC race effort would come a year later in the SCORE-sanctioned Parker 400.) It wasn’t to be Thompson’s last interaction with the ATC250R, either, as he’d go on to play a huge part in getting an official three-wheel class sanctioned in time for the 1981 Baja 1000.

The ATC250R would go on to several performance-enhancing evolutions (improved suspension in 1983; liquid-cooling, Pro-Link suspension and low-profile knobbies in 1985) until it was discontinued after 1986.

However, the ATC250R’s legacy would be forever etched in the history of high-performance ATV-ing. And while the model itself might have been discontinued, the performance standards first established by this machine can still be seen today on every Honda ATV from the SportTrax 400EX to the FourTrax Rincon.